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.

Apple Strikes Back

Maybe not Apple directly but you know they likely pushed forward with this investigation, which has now led to a hardcore search on the Gizmodo editor's house.  The police even nabbed all of his digital media and files.  Hopefully he's backed them up on the cloud...

All of this for posting photos and a writeup of a new iPhone that they found in a bar.