Vividly Mobile

Palm the makers of the recent Palm Pre are looking for a buyer seeing the sales of the Pre didn’t rock the iPhone boat and it didn’t bail them out of their debt pool.

So what has Palm got going for it that others want?

Most 25-45 yo’s in the USA and Europe are very familiar with the Palm brand, they’ve been making hand held devices for years. So if you don’t have a strong brand presence in these regions Palm may be just the ticket.

Any serious company in the hand held market has a pretty impressive IP portfolio. This IP portfolio is used in the IP trading game, which happens amongst the big players in the industry (or not as the case may be between Nokia and Apple). Palm is no exception and has a very mature IP portfolio.

Finally, there’s the very tidy Palm Web OS mobile SW platform for app development, nicely architectured, but to date it’s only been proven on the Pre and the almost unheard of Pixi. So by definition it may be premature to refer to it as a platform. Either way, it is a good development platform with early promise.

Current speculation is an Asian suitor such as ZTE or Huawei may pull out the cheque book, but apart from the brand and IP count the motivation isn’t really there, as both have been playing with Android already. Unless Palm launches some more products that accumulatively grabs the smart phone market then Palm are very likely going to be squeezed in to mobile history.

UPDATE 29/April – HP (not exactly an Asian company) has waded in and bought Palm for it’s IP and Web OS. So whilst the brand Palm may vanish behind HP, the Web OS lives on.