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Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

Do Palm or Access still hold the IP rights to Be Inc.? That may be of interest to Nokia, even though Palm did nothing with it :-(

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

Actually, if Nokia did buy Palm the only upside would be to p!ss off Mike Cane - he still haunts the Palm Info Center web site. Luckily the Nokia Internet Tablets weren't to his liking - too sophisticated. ;)

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

I believe Palm may own the rights to what remains of Be Inc., but Palm sold the rights for the Palm OS to Access only for Palm to recently licence it back again (at least, Palm now have a generous licence for Garnet aka v5 Palm OS which is pretty much the same version they sold to Access).

Access are now busy trying to develop a modern version of Palm OS which uses Linux with a Palm compatability layer called Access Linux Platform (ALP). I guess the plan is/was for Access to licence ALP back to Palm at some stage in the future.

Here's a link to an article on Palm Info Center with photos of ALP running on a Marvel (ARM) development board and also video of a phone handset (probably just a keyboard + screen wired into the same development board) from 3GSM 2007. Comments from the Palm devoted follow the article at the bottom of the page - the first comment made me chuckle as it sums up Palm owners who have been missing out on so much for so long:

Quote:

It's like porn but better.

ALP actually looks pretty rubbish! :)

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

An interesting series of up to date articles on Palm (where it went wrong), Symbian, ARM, Linux, WinCE, Apple+iPhone etc.:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...1512E423F.html

I hadn't realised that Nokia were once a Palm OS licencee! :eek:

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

I thought it was PalmSource (bought by Access), not PalmOne (now Palm) that bought BE? I may be mistaken though.
Another thing that nobody could yet figure out the details about is that Palm (formerly PalmOne) kept hiring Linux programmers over the last two years, apparently doing some Linux work in parallel with what PalmSource was doing. PalmSource started its Linux work by buying a Chinese linux mobile company, and Access continued this after buying PalmSource.
What it all ends up with is anybody's guess.

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

The combined Palm (pre split) bought Be Inc in 2001.

From the article I posted above from roughlydrafted.com...

Quote:

Then in 2002 Palm created a subsidiary to develop the Palm OS, and later spun it off as PalmSource. The hardware remains of Palm merged with Handspring the next year to create palmOne. This was confusing for people who thought they owned a Palm, when really they had bought a palmOne device running Palm OS from PalmSource.

Re: Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

Based on Palm's current shaky financial situation, I doubt a partnership would save them-- a joint venture (which Nokia loves) maybe. An outright purchase, certainly.

EDIT: although the pundits agree with Milhouse (no surprise, actually)--

Quote:

"We do not believe that Palm holds any significant attraction for Nokia and see no reason why Nokia would want to acquire it," said Richard Windsor, a London-based analyst with Nomura International.

Carolina Milanesi, a principal analyst in Gartner's mobile-devices team, was even blunter.

"This doesn't make any sense," she said, stressing that buying Palm would be a huge strategic about-face for Nokia, which uses the Symbian operating system in its enterprise devices as opposed to the Palm and Windows Mobile platforms used by the U.S. company.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...yhoo&dist=yhoo