Posted by Greg MIlls

HP bought Palm for it’s technology a while back and has funded the work on continuing to develop the Palm webOS smartphone platform. HP hopes to use the Palm webOS in its upcoming mobile devices.

The history of Palm is one of missed opportunities and squandered innovation. At one time PDA and cellphones hadn’t yet merged and Palm had a great PDA product set.

Apple played with DPAs and then abandoned the effort until they created the iPhone and the iOS, which really combined the PDA, iPod and the cellphone in ways no one but Apple could see. It should have been Palm that did it, but it wasn’t. Palm has declined in value to the point they were takeover bait for the likes of HP.

HP has a pretty broad line of products, but along with a number of other computer hardware makers, it is heavily invested in smartphones and tablets as they see that mobile devices are the future of computing.

Rumors are afloat that sprint, the lackluster runt of the US cellphone network litter, has quit handling the Pre line of HP smartphones that they pumped endlessly a few years back. HP has even been seen completely dropping the Pre line of HP smartphones by industry analysts. HP and sprint have not commented on the rumor, which leads one to think the story is right.

HP’s Pre and Pixi had multitasking much sooner than most other smartphones, which to me isn’t that big a deal. Perhaps since I can’t chew gum and walk a straight line at the same time, multitasking goes right over my head.

The AT&T (No bars in more places) network tries to differentiate themselves with other iPhone networks (Verizon, Can you hear me now?) by pushing the notion of using internet functions such as mobile Safari while talking on the same AT&T iPhone. I would accidentally drop the call, drop the iPhone or forget what I was talking about trying to juggle all that at once. In over 4 years of iPhone use, I have never needed to do anything more than try to access a contact phone while talking on my iPhone.