“When Hewlett-Packard coughed up $1.2 billion for Palm last spring, the acquisition was widely viewed as a quick way for the company to capture a slice of the increasingly important mobile device market,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD.

“And while the launch of the Veer and the Touchpad proved that true, there was another reason as well: Palm’s intellectual property,” Paczkowski reports. “As former HP CEO Mark Hurd explained a few months after the acquisition: ‘We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business… we bought it for the IP.’”

Paczkowski reports, “Current HP CEO Léo Apotheker said Thursday the company is considering all its strategic options. But, given the current environment, selling off the Palm patent portfolio is surely at the top of the list… A Palm patent sale could be an easy way for HP to ‘extract value from webOS,’ as Apotheker said.”

Read more in the full article here.