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Palm acquire Handspring

Palm announces(and here) acquisition of Handspring to bolster industry leadership. The deal is done by stock swap, and it would take place after Palm spin-off its software arm “PalmSource”http://www.palmsource.com/ — which licensed its PalmOS to various PDA, handhelds and mobile vendors.

In Chinese there’s an idiom saying if people stay together for too long the relationship might be broken, after splitting for a certain time, the relationship is back and united. It’s well explained in business world. Hawkins and Dubinsky, who brought the world Palm Pilot, leaving Palm and form Handspring in 1999. Since then they have produced series of Handspring PDA to market: from Visor, Visor Delux, Visor Edge to Treo. All these products are still licensing the PalmOS from Palm and both Palm and Handspring basically competing on the same market of Palm PDA. And now they merged, it seem a positive move after Palm PDA market started to sinked recent years and facing strong challenge from Pocket PC.

There isn’t much innovation come from Palm since they gain their success with Palm III series PDA. And they are a bit slow compare to evolution of Microsoft camp, where Pocket PC bring more power and colorful world based on Intel ARM processors. Later Palm switched to Intel processor from Motorola. It start catching up with more attractive/modern PDA: the Tungsten series.

I’ve been focusing on PalmOS programming on 1999 to 2000. So I’d looking forward to next round of revolution with their merging with Handspring.