Revisiting the future of palm

A week ago, I had written about Palm's woes and the future of a good mobile OS. Couple of days ago, it was announced that HP stepped up to scoop the mobile device company for 1.2 billion dollars. Considering that the valuation of Palm was more than twice the sale price less than a year ago, it seems like HP has got itself a bargain. Only time will tell if this is as good a deal for HP as we think it is today. Synergies can be challenging as HP knows very well- for years now the Compaq-HP wedding has been questioned. What is undeniable is that HP has landed itself a good mobile OS backed by a great developer team.After my initial draft of this post, I read this morning that HP was considering dropping Windows 7 for its tablet offerings. Whether this is due to fears that the Slate wouldn't stand up to the iPad in its current form or the hope that a better tablet can be made with webOS is unknown. What is known that HP wants to use webOS in as many ways as possible and considering HP's past, current and future ambitions, this could be big.This indicates that the mobile OS wars will now have a muscled up fourth competitor to RIM, Apple and Google. This makes for a very interesting battle ahead and for the consumer, this is just a great time to buy a nice smartphone.