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Apple tried to buy Palm

1 Comment / News, Phones / By /

It turns out that even Apple and Google tried to buy Palm, despite the wails and moans about the bleak outlook of the company, even with its new webOS and phones.

I still think this was a good buy for HP. They’ll be able to take and use webOS in more ways than the other possible suitors. Google probably would not have used webOS (they have Android), or at most sucked in the best parts to Android. They also probably don’t want to be in the phone hardware business.

As for Apple, the ‘patent theory’ seems right, especially with NTP now going after the rest of the big phone makers, after taking a nice bite out of RIM.

I’m sure too that HP was looking for a upgrade of sorts for their iPAQs (remember those?). But as with all such things, time will tell if this works out for HP.

via Business Insider

Palm acquired by HP

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PalmPalm has been saved, purchased by HP for $1.2 billion, which was a premium on the stock price. This is a good deal for both companies. Palm was in serious trouble, with its new Pre and Pixi smartphones not selling very well, and its stock price tanking. HP on the other hand did not have much of a mobile presence, as its last real mobile device, the iPaq has been floundering in the face of iPhones, Android phones, etc.

The other big opportunity for both companies will be the potential for Palm’s new mobile OS, called webOS, to appear on even more devices including ‘slates’ and netbooks.  Perhaps with HP’s much larger market reach and marketing budget, the webOS app market may stand a chance of taking off.

HP Press Release

Memristors could take over from Transistors, increase # and power of chips

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Transistors may make way for a new type of switch for computer chips. Called a memristor (short for memory resistor), they are simpler than transistors and can store information even without an electric current.

memristorAt the speed at which technology normally moves, it’s a bit surprising that this device first conceived of in 1971 by Leon Chua at UC Berkeley, has only seen the light in the past 2 years.

HP is leading the memristor charge and have announced significant progress. In particular, they have come up with ways to stack layers of switches upon each other, hugely increasing the density of chip components.

As for size, current transistors have sizes of 30 to 40nm (nanometers), while HP has been toying with 3nm memristors. That’s a 10x improvement in size, and that’s not even including the stacking advantage.

via NYTimes

HP MV2120 500GB Media Vault

Computers, Gizmo of the Day / By /

Remember the days when you just bought (or built) a computer with however much storage you needed/wanted? Nowadays, your computer is more brains and less brawn, at least in the storage department, as detached storage, typically on the network becomes more popular for the home.

Here’s another such example – the HP Media Vault. We’re featuring the 2120 that ships with a 500GB SATA hard drive, and you can another one to it (up to 1TB), but HP has a whole line of these media vaults. It can handle RAID 1 mirroring so you don’t lose data if one of your drives goes down. It ships with a 10/100/1000 NIC. Excellent.

But what gives these storage devices (or media vaults as HP calls them) that little extra oomph, is the embedded OS (typically Linux) and applications that allow you to control the drives remotely as well as share out specific sections of data to your home network or even the Internet if you so choose.

For example, you could set up the 2120 as your central media location and stream your music and videos from it. It also has HP’s Photo Webshare for showing off your photos. For even more control, you can set up user accounts and dictate who can access and/or modify what.

For under $300, these external storage solutions make expanding your capacity a snap. You may also be interested in checking out the Drobo which takes storage redundancy to a new user-friendly level.

Gimme!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $289.00
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

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