With Palm, HP reboots mobile strategy

With Palm, HP reboots mobile strategy - CNN.com: "With its purchase of Palm, Hewlett-Packard acquired more than just a smartphone maker. It also picked up a whole new strategy for its mobile devices.

HP said Wednesday it plans to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion, or $5.70 per share, which amounts to a 23 percent premium over Palm's actual stock price at the end of the day. But for a leading technology company like HP with almost zero mobile phone presence and $13.5 billion in cash, picking up a company with a fully developed mobile operating system, a decent lineup of devices, and trove of mobile patents is a bargain.

It will also make HP a viable competitor in the growing mobile market.

Mobile phones are now a $100 billion market. There were 182 million smartphones shipped in 2009, and that number is expected to rise to 247 million units this year, according to iSuppli.

HP not getting in on that is unthinkable, particularly since practically all of its major competitors in the consumer space have some sort of mobile strategy. With Palm, HP gets the 10th largest smartphone brand as of the end of last year. Palm's hardware accounted for 1.5 percent of all smartphones, but wasn't growing, according to iSuppli.

By planning to infuse plenty of funding into its new mobile strategy with Palm, HP is expecting 'solid growth' going forward, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, said on a conference call with investors Wednesday.

It's been years since mobile phones were a priority for HP. Compaq, which was acquired by HP, was an early leader in handhelds, creating the iPaq, the first handheld running Windows CE to get much popularity."