Palm
The company Palm had a great run in the market until recent times when the iPhone and BlackBerry mobile phones started becoming popular. Palm mobiles had also used touch-screen facilities, and were known for their indigenous software, which made handling your contacts, organizing, advanced web use, multimedia uses and other features. Palm cell phones allowed a commendable number of applications to run parallel to each other, without performance getting sluggish. In 2010, Palm was bought over by HP, after a slump partly owing to the economic slowdown, and mostly owing to rising competition simultaneously.
The last few years at Palm were bleak in terms of the company's sustainability in the smart phones market. In spite of other competitors becoming stronger with time, Palm's downhill run was stopped by HP's move to overtake the responsibility of keeping the smart phones in business, especially owing to their traditional popularity. Another factor that caused Palm's downfall is often understood as the difficulties they faced as they planned to move inventory at Verizon. The plan may have expected to save the company from lack of liquidity, but it was a struggling effort, which made them stop for the day.
Many sources believe that HP may have overpaid Palm while buying them out, but others believe there was good reason for doing so. The future of Web OS, which made the Palm phones a favorite choice for advanced web users, was at a precarious stage, owing to the fall in business and popularity, after the iPhone and other touch-screen models made an entry in 2007. Added competition was a great burden foreseen especially with Dell moving into the smart phones market in the near future. Since HP lacked the much preferred Web OS or its patent and intellectual rights, they seemed to be the perfect choice of buying the company which still had a lot of value as intellectual property and assets.
The Web OS was at a relatively nascent stage while it became an HP property in 2010. Experts believe that HP made the right move also because the Web OS may have more potential, as it is inherently user-friendly, supports heavy web applications, networking and emailing. With many other options in the specifications list of the Palm mobiles, they are hot favorites if the marketing and sales department of a company is in healthy condition. The question whether HP will make it or not depends solely on the company's efforts and innovation, given that market conditions remain even. Since most companies are going the Android way shown by Motorola, HP's decision was also lauded by many experts implying that Web OS stands a chance of overtaking the iPhone in the long-run as well.
The present fate of Palm's asset depends on the efficiency with which the HP's plans are implemented. The back end plan and strategy announced by HP includes some prominent measures, which primarily includes the Web OS ownership. Scaling up Palm mobiles with a financial support from their coffers, canalizing the products to the right markets consistently and involves as many endorsers for the marketing of the new brand. The plan in general, looks competent and optimistic. Given that Palm mobiles never had a heavy share of bad customer reviews, the phones will not be overlooked.