HP acquires Palm, declares commitment to webOS
Surprise, surprise! Palm have been sold. It's not like we didn't see it coming but it just happened so quickly. Quite unexpectedly the highest bidder turned out to be HP. The quoted acquisition price stands at 1.2 billion US dollars.
There have been speculations on Palm's future for a long time now (involving names like HTC, Lenovo, etc.) but the mystery has just been solved. HP decided to acquire Palm's shares and paid 5.70 US dollars per share.
Now, they are good 1.2 billion US dollars behind and one still fresh and very promising OS ahead. The webOS (which we tried on the Palm Pre) still has plenty of unrevealed potential and HP have understandably declared their commitment to it.
Jon Rubinstein, the man who brought Palm back to life (then back to the counter and finally sold them), started his career at HP. He is still the CEO of Palm and is said to remain part of the company even after the acquisition.
And this is the letter to his team, the Palm employees, in which he shares with them the news and his excitement about it.