There’s rampant speculation that Palm may soon be acquired by HTC or Lenovo, and the news is doing good things for Palm’s stock price.
Palm’s stock was up over 11% today and that’s good news considering it was only a few weeks ago when analysts were predicting it couldn’t live through the year. The company is probably worth about $1 billion when all is said and done but a bidding war could increase that figure significantly.
But Palm’s in the shitter, right? Who would pay that much? Palm has many more assets than you think. First of all, webOS is incredible, elegant and the best 1.0 smartphone operating system I’ve ever seen. Pushing that at scale with stellar hardware could be a great thing. Furthermore, Palm knows the smartphone space inside and out, and it has a boat load of patents that could help someone like HTC defend itself from big, bad Apple. Additionally, HTC seems like its crying out of its own OS and I’m giddy about thinking what the Sense UI folk could do to webOS.
As for Lenovo, all computer makers realize that the lines between smartphones and laptops are quickly blurring and you have to have a good mobile strategy to survive. This is why we’ve seen Acer and Dell take the plunge into the smartphone pool. Lenovo’s not a complete stranger to the game as it has released some odd but undoubtedly cool smartphone hardware.
[Via MarkeWatch]