“Palm said Wednesday that it will buy rival Handspring in an effort to strengthen its grip on the market for handheld devices. Palm, which also announced that it has finalized plans to spin off its PalmSource software division, will purchase Handspring in a stock deal,” reports John G. Spooner for CNET News.com.
Spooner reports, “The transaction will grant Handspring stockholders 0.09 of a share of Palm–and no shares of PalmSource–for each share of Handspring common stock. Based on Tuesday’s closing price, that values each Handspring share at $1.09, slightly lower than Handspring’s closing price of $1.11.”
“The deal is expected to close this fall, after the spinoff of PalmSource. Palm Solutions Group, the company’s hardware arm, will then merge operations with Handspring, creating a new hardware company,” writes Spooner. “By adding Handspring’s Treo hybrid cell phone/PDA to its own line of Palm personal digital assistants, Palm believes it can create a much broader product line, giving it an advantage in the market. The company also gains access to Handspring’s technology and the company’s relationships with resellers and cellular service providers.”
Full article here.
This could be VERY cool…
Palm bought a lot of the Newton software from Apple when they shut down the Newton PDA several years ago. In addition Palm bought the rights and software of Be OS when it shut down. With the splitting of Palm into hardware and software sides, Apple could buy the Palm software company without having to re-enter the PDA market.
Why would this be good?
With Apple controlling the Palm OS, they could make sure that Mac OS X and Palm OS were tightly integrated. Further, if the Palm OS were to falter, then Pocket PC (from M$) would control and define the PDA and mobile device software market, which would NOT be good.
Finally, throw in the awseome Be OS, which ran on both PPC and Intel/AMD computers, which could be updated and offered to the PC world as an alternative to XP and the ever enveloping clutches of M$. An update to be would not take much as it already supported multiple processors, 64 bit file systems, etc. There was a time, before OS X was very far along in development, that Apple tried to buy Be OS. By buying the Palm software spin-off, Apple could re-enter PDA’s drom the software side & get a kick-ass PC OS to blunt and frustrate the folks up the coast. IF THEY DON”T DO THIS THEY ARE CRAZY.