Nokia rumored to be eyeing Palm buy yet again
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Nov 13th 2009 4:28PM
posted Nov 13th 2009 4:28PM
We've been around this rumor pretty much since Palm started looking competitive again, so take it for what you will -- but a bunch of fat cats down on Wall Street have been going ape today over renewed "chatter" that Nokia might be taking an interest in acquiring Palm. Palm's share prices are up well over 5 percent on the day, though we wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there was some behind-the-scenes manipulation going on here -- an acquisition would make less sense now than ever with suitors on the hook for $2 billion or more, a hefty sum even for a giant like Nokia, never mind the fact that they've still got two smartphone platforms of their own in the mix. Licensing webOS is being floated as a possible alternative to an outright Palm purchase -- but we're having such an exceedingly difficult time picturing a 5800 running webOS that we'll put this one on ice until we get the joint press release.
Hmm, waiting for a call back on a interview with Palm...
Too bad fox news owns the wall street journal.
any clues. I’ve looked all over and cant find one way to do it not even a hint. i dont like mobile me because it is still too new tor it to function they way it should.
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2149951
If Nokia would be smart it would jump on the Android bandwagon too and maybe skin it to its heart content so as to be able to keep on bragging about their originality .
Android singlehandedly saved Moto from oblivion and now that the Satio proved to be an even worse disaster than the Experia X1, Android (on the X10) will also be the last straw left to grab to SE.
Apart for HTC and Samsung it seems that all cell phone makers adopt Android only if they are faced with imminent bankruptcy.
S60 in the new touch screen environment is miserably inadequate and although I have no idea of how good Memo is gonna be but I doubt that it could compete with Android on its very first edition and the indisputable fact is that the OVI store is a bad joke.
If Nokia would adopt Android , (or even PalmOS , why not?) it could concentrate on making what it does best : hardware, marketing, and industrial design.
Let's see. Symbian has 50% of the smartphone market. Nokia owns 39% of the smartphone market, and all via Symbian. Android, with all manufacturers combined, only has about 5% of the smartphone market, with HTC, Samsung, and Motorola workilng together to amass 1/10th of the Symbian market share and 1/8th what Nokia pushes out at the moment. So for every Android device sold, 10 Symbian devices are sold, and 8 of those are Nokia devices. Every device manufacturer would kill for numbers like that. Leaving Symbian for Android would be a foolhardy move, obviously.
Now besides Apple, no one is making as much profits from their handset and smartphone divisions than Nokia, and the catalyst for Apple's profits is its exclusivity deal in the US and its App Store royalties, something that won't continue forever. Many manufacturers are on the Android bandwagon while they await the release of Symbian^4, which has the largest carriers and manufacturers behind it. Nokia ALWAYS makes profits, even while catering to emerging markets across the globe.
Motorola has done a decent recovery start, but one quarter won't save any company. Mindshare and momentum change everyday, but Nokia has been and will be the leader in the mobile smartphone arena for a long time. An eight quarter growth spurt isn't enough to supplant anyone with such a firm foothold on the industry, as Apple has shown.
Why has no one said the same for Blackberry/RIM? Should they switch to Android, too? Apple has nearly caught them, and they aren't making massive profits like you'd imagine...
Why you brought up S60 is beyond me. S60 is dead, and will be replaced by Symbian^4 in about 12 months, with a completely new UI and open source codebase. And Maemo isn't new. Its a five year old OS from Nokia's internet tablet division. And its Linux, which is far older than the new OS you make it out to be.
So your suggestions that they abandon the most robust and feature complete OS for a nascent OS with 5% of the market is retarded thinking. And choosing WebOS is worse. You don't know the limitations these OSes have for developers, and making these choices based on emotional sentiments is how you end up like...Motorola! Let Nokia continue making great choices for longevity and focus on which device is best for you.
@ Cristexaport
You got it all wrong man: Nokia sells a huge amount of cell phones compared to any other producer, but the near totality of their sales are made of cheap, basic models, mostly aimed at emerging markets ; a playng field where profits are razor thin and competition from the likes of Huawei and other up and coming south asian products will become harder and harder in the near future.
While these basic phones still represent Nokia's bread and butter, Nokia's problem is in the highly profitable smartphone segment, which is also the one that has grown most in the last year and will keep growing most for the foreseeable future.
These are not my opinions , by the way, this is a situation that Nokia itself has aknowledged and is fighting with all its forces.
I loved my N95, and as soon as the N95 came out I bought that one too and I loved it even more.
At the time Smartphone meant N95 or BB and the N95 was the most desirable phone on the market.
After this success they just stopped innovating .
I skipped the N96 in favor of Samsung Omnia and HTC' touchHD , but for what I have heard it was an unmitigated disaster.
So when last summer the N97 came out , full of fond memories of my old N95s, I grabbed one of the very first to get to the EU market and I got pretty disappointed by it, even the things in which Nokia excelled , such as speach recognition or video taking turned out to be decidedly sub par; so much so that I kept on using my old HTC TouchHD and bought an iPhone 3GS which I exchanged few days later with my beloved HTC Hero.
Since last month, after 3 new ROMs in 6 months and dozens of firmwares and upgrades and some weeks in Nokia repair shop to fix some building glitches, the N97 has become a pretty decent phone, and Nokia has really done a great job in fixing up the mess that it was when it was released; but still it is undoubtly vastly inferior to my HTC Hero and the New HTC HD2 which I got just yesterday to replace my old TouchHD, and next week I'm gonna try to sell it and minimize my lossess.
Symbian is great for the cheap phones that constitute the bulk of Nokia sales, but it was designed long before touch screens became a smartphone must, and is painfully inadequate and outdated to drive today's smartphones.
Nokia is fully aware of the situation: that's why after the N97 sales fell far short of Nokia expectations, they came out with the N900 and put Maemo in it: they realize that S60 has done its bit and now it's just to old to be satifactorily patched up; therefor all the rumors of Nokia interest in buying or licensing Plalm's OS.
Shame, because Nokia has done more than any other cell phone maker to avoid to alienate their customers: besides aknowledging the N97 bugs and substituting for free the camera lens, its cover and fixing the GPS lag, it even gave me for free a full year subscription to the latest OVI maps (which is great) worth about 100$ and sent me some cool Nokia accessories and softwares.
The trouble is that HTC (for exemple) just don't need to do any of this: yesterday was the first day that the HD2 was available here in Denmark and it was sold out all over the country in the very same day (I barely managed to grab one) .
And even though the new HD2 will surely become my primary phone I just can't bring myself to sell my beloved Hero: it's just to good and too much fun to use, while you will find my N97 with its excellent Ovi maps subscription on the danish equivalent of craigslist.
Nokia badly needs a winner in the smartphone segment and that means finding a modern OS for it and bringing the ridiculous OVI store near to Android market or Apple shop standards.
From next week the N900 will be available in danish retailers but I'm not optimist about it , certainly this time I will not rush to buy one, but even if I find it extremely unlikely I will like nothing better than being proved wrong and to be driven back in the fold of Nokia users.
There are valid points on both sides of this argument, both of you have valid points, which I suspect is why Nokia finds itself at the crossroads it does right now, and why rumors like this deal for Palm continue to surface.
@Plexus - the one thing (besides great industrial design) Nokia has done is build itself a reputation on its own, and unlike manufacturers like HTC and Samsung, they are a leader not a follower. Yes, they make cheap handsets but they have also been known for their solid upper brand sets as well. Running to Android makes them become a "me too" player trying to skin Android to be their "own" Now that might be one prong of a multi-proing attack, but not at the price of abandoning everything else.
@Cristexaport - it is funny how you knock somebody else for making "emotional choices" and then at the same time degrade into name calling because you don't like what was suggested. It is also amusing that your suggestion that when on top, the only play is to "stay the course" because you are doing better than anybody else at that particular moment... Because, isn't *that* (and not "reacting to emotional choices") that really had the death sprial effect that put Motorola in the position they were in? Despite clamoring to change and the end of the "thin is in" vogue of 5 years ago, Motorola continued pegging way too much on the Razr, Krazr, the Q and other thin but mediocre products?
It seems there will be some shakeout coming soon... real soon, and not everybody will survive... at least not in the form as they stand today...and I look forward to seeing what this landscape is going to look like.
@ Plexus,
Thanks for the reply. You made alot of points, but you overlook certain facts and analysis of the market. I'm confident that I do in fact have it spot on based on my research. Nokia sells alot of smartphones in various price points, and many are in the low to midrange. What you don't get is that gaining customers is almost as good as gaining profit. Indoctrinating a user to your platform allows a certain percentage of loyalty, no matter how great or small. And some of these entry level device users will ugrade to a higher end model later.
As for the emerging markets, it is these markets that will see the most growth, and the source of the next billion mobile users over the next 5-10 years. India, China, and the African nations each have more people without mobiles than the entire US market! China has more prospective consumers than twice the US population! Imagine the 500 million in China buying devices. Think they want or can afford a $650 iPhone or the $250 5800 XM, which has comparable specs and a soon to be open source OS?
Apple might command 1-2% of the emerging Chinese market, for 5-10 million devices sold, versus Nokia's manufacturing capacity and pricing structure to command 30%, or 150 million devices sold. Now Nokia could earn $2 for each of those consumers for a $300 million revenue boom. Apple would need to earn $30-60 per customer to match those numbers, and with the smaller amount of consumers, they are taking a higher risk, and are more exposed to any market fluctuations. Imagine if a national disaster occurs, and Nokia only reaps $.50 services revenues per consumer, and from only 50% of its consumers. That's $37.5 million. Now if Apple got $10 per customer, and from only 50% of its customers, they're looking at $25,000,000 -50,000,000. Economies of scale always win. Slim profits are good when on a massive scale. Ask WalMart...
I also will say Nokia sells a large amount of high end devices, having sold many N97s already, We'll see how well the N900 does, especially once TMobile starts carrying Nseries models and at&t begins to implement the Ovi Store, both happening in 2010. I don't think anyone beside the iPhone sold over 3 million devices, but the N97 sold as much. They don't need it to sell like hot cakes, since they aren't hedged against one model. They have a multidevice approach to addressing the markets, and it has worked well so far. I don't see any Huawei or LG building a better device than Nokia at any pricepoint but the highest, and I doubt they have the expertise, manufacturing capacity, or loyalty to make anyone fear them yet.
The N95 was indeed the most iconic device of the decade, although Americans mostly missed out on that era. But Nokia didn't stop innovating. They have the best smartphones for under $300. They worked on their services, which other manufacturers depend on Google for. They stalled development of Symbian to retool, and in the meantime brought you a Maemo powered N95 successor. Everyone has tried to make Linux/Unix on a mobile possible, and LiMo is close, but Apple and Android failed miserably in comparison to Nokia's homerun N900. In the meantime, the N97's new firmware has made it sing compared to when it was released, and no one else has released an S60 5th Edition device with a full keypad and such a high grade camera in one package, and no phone can out feature the N97 even today. I'd like to compare the Hero to the N97, and you tell me what the N97 CAN'T do the Hero can, and I'll make a list of what the Hero can never do the N97 can. It may not be as cute, but I'm about productivity and function, not beauty pageants. Your preferences may differ, however.
Just because Symbian is 10 years old means nothing in relation to touchscreens. BSD is far older, and its fine for the iPhone. A UI is like a jacket, and can easily be replaced. Nokia just didn't waste time knowing they'd be revamping the entire OS in just a year. Once Symbian^4 is released, your statements will not seem so smart. What do you really know about Symbian? It seems you confuse Symbian with S60, which is a soon to die UI of Symbian. In fact, Symbian has a longer history of touchscreens than any of the current mindshare champs via UIQ, so saying Symbian is inadequate for touchscreen devices is just neophyte conjecture. You made no mention of APIs, app frameworks, processor cycle or memory handling, or anything a real synopsis of an OS should entail. You ony mention the UI, which is an interchangeable part that is scheduled to be changed soon.
You act as if the N900 was a response to falling sales, which everyone experienced during the release of the N97. That's a foolhardy proposition, since the N900 development began when the N95 was released. So you're not entirely accurate in your assumptions. Maemo has been in development for years, and is an answer to firmware hacking by gadget enthusiasts, and a complement to Symbian and its Qt strategy, not a detour. Symbian doesn't need to be patched, just redressed.
Who creates these ideas you put out here? I think you just have alot to learn about mobiles, but you at least have done some research. I just suggest you do more. For instance, Palm doesn't have any benefit to Nokia. Few patents, a nascent OS with many functionality holes and a limited, weak application framework, 3% market share, and less carrier penetration in the US than even Symbian. I'm willing to bet ahead of time that Symbian outsells Palm's WebOS in 2010 at least twofold. Look for WebOS to be either open sourced, killed off, or just forgotten altogether. The only reason they've started the Nokia rumors is to boost their stock price. Trust me.
The HTC HD2 is a fine device screen wise, and I'm not afraid of Windows Mobile, but if not for the large screen, I'd prefer the N97 myself. Hero's cool too, and I'd take it over the HD2 as well. The Ovi Store stuff will just take time. It isn't a long term strategy, though, since the apps of the future will be browser based, and whoever has the best browser wins. Its all about web apps, services, and cross platform development. And Nokia has this ecosystem set up perfectly. So Nokia isn't going anywhere any more than Blackberries, which have a far worse OS and app framework. So get used to them. Nokia IS the winner in the smartphone segment, Symbian is the Swiss Army knife of the smartphone world, Maemo is the SUV, Qt is the Java of the next decade, and I'm the one that told you first! If you're so excited about Android but not Maemo, you have plenty to learn about OS architecture and what developers like.
I'll see you on the Nokia aisle, bro. You'll be back soon.
@ JayMonster,
Did I miss something? You might want to read my post again, because I don't see anytime I called anyone a name of any sort in my posts. And I don't mind emotional choices. I'm pretty emotional about my tech choices, too. But I base my emotions on convictions built from research and principles, not sentiment. And I don't try to use my emotions as the foundations of pseudo facts. But I'm happy to have gotten you to laugh. The mirror doesn't always do the trick when you're too blind to read my posts, but my unintended jokes are pretty successful on you, for some reason. I find that more funny than anything.
Does Nokia revamping the UI, adding a new official third party app framework, releasing the Symbian OS to the open source community, releasing a high end device on a Linux OS that's also open source, recommitting to GPUs in future devices, recommitting to reclaiming the imaging crown, launching netbooks, and implementing their web services strategy count as "staying the course" to you? Maybe I don't know what the term means... Or is it you? Moto lost by not looking outside of WinMo for smart devices fast enough, and letting its feature phone platform grow stale with no new features in years. It was their software, not hardware, that was the issue. You can still buy a Razr in the US! Its pretty hard to find an N95-1 and near impossible to find the N90 in the US, and they came out AFTER the Razr. Nokia has done nothing similar to Moto, and hasn't seen any results remotely similar, either. Do you forget that Nokia is STILL the leader in the smartphone space by a country mile?!
I think there's room for many smart OSes, and I think the only loser will be Palm's WebOS, which doesn't have the carrier support, robust app frameworks, or differentiating factor to set it apart. But we'll have to see more. Rome wasn't built in a day.
@christexaport
"So your suggestions that they abandon the most robust and feature complete OS for a nascent OS with 5% of the market is retarded thinking."
We are *all* opinions an nothing more. But just because don't agree don't make somebody else's thoughts "retarded thinking." That is all I meant about the "name calling" (Yes, I do realize some do worse, but it was out of place with the rest of your well thought out "proof" of why you believe you are correct.
And, no... I do not think that by doing some of the things you are mentioning that Nokia is "staying the course" with Symbian... necessarily. At the very least they are doing far more than Microsoft did to help keep WinMo from falling apart and out of favor the way it did. But honestly, I thought some of the best moves Nokia made was the acquisition of TrollTech and the addition of P.I.P.S. which may help make the development of apps and extensions of the platform attainable for many more developers.
But the question remains, and is spurred at least in part by the fact that (although they deny it) that Samsung looks to (possibly) be abandoning Symbian, and Sony Ericson is at the very least, if not giving up on Symbian, to be spreading their choices around by using Android on at least some products.
I'm not so much disagreeing with you, as trying to point out that their is more than one way to look at how this can possibly unfold, and that the thought of Nokia offering (not really replacing per se) Android devices may not be cut and dry "retarded thinking."
Maemo's first edition?
Maemo's first edition was 3 or 4 years ago. The N900 will be shipping with Maemo _5_.
Nokia shouldn't abandon Maemo in favor of Android. They should incorporate the Android runtimes into Maemo, giving customers the best of both platforms.
I am not sure this is the best thign for PALM, but hopefully, if Nokia were to buy Palm strictly for the OS.. the WebOS would pop up on a lot more phones on a lot more carriers quicker.
says who? at at the expense of Symbian or Maemo?!
LOOK AT ALL THESE VIRGINS!!!
Yeah, PALM is subject to a lot of speculation on Wall St. It was shorted last week, and now is seeing a bounceback.
This has happened over and over again for the past couple years. For those of us in the real (tech) world, a Palm takeover is far from reality,
This is was published in '07 but it sounds like it was published Friday: http://seekingalpha.com/article/27652-palm-as-a-buyout-target-suitors-abound
NOT HAPPENING!
I can't think of any good reason than Nokia would buy Palm. A few years ago, yes. Today? no. Palm doesn't have anything (including WebOS) that is more valuable than what Nokia already owns. Not even the user base.
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