HP makes a smart move in buying Palm

Yesterday HP announced that it was buying Palm for $1.2B, a 28% premium over the current (volatile) Palm stock price, which has ranged from around $3 to $18 a share in the past year.

HP immediately makes itself hugely competitive in both the smartphone and tablet/slate markets with this acquisition.  Up until this point, HP has been mainly silent on smartphones.  They used to have a decent PDA product, but not in the past 8-9 years.  The Palm Pre and Pixi are not perfect but they represent a viable competitor to the other smartphones.  Additionally, as Apple has shown, smartphone OS's can work on tablets too.  And webOS is already able to multi-task.  It does need more apps and some other features, but it is probably only a year away from working as a slate OS.