The big buzz today is over the Palm merger with Handspring, a deal that’s a standout because it re-unites a couple of people (Donna Dubinsky and Eric Benhamou) who seriously dislike each other and combines two money-losing companies. So why do it? The obvious reasons are economies of scale, shared channels, blah, blah, blah, but I think the real reason to do it now is this:
Palm, which also announced that it has finalized plans to spin off its PalmSource software division, will purchase Handspring in a stock deal.
Emphasis added. Palm will own a bunch of PalmSource stock and have members of the board, and without the merger Handspring would have had nothing. So now Handspring not only has a cleaner sales channel, they also have a hand on the tiller of Palm OS, not a bad thing to do in these days of WinCE and Linux. Which brings us to the question of how long it’s gonna be before we have combo PDAs and cell phones that run license-free embedded Linux.
Probably not too long, and now that we have Linux-based video phones, they just might be pretty interesting gadgets:
Support is included for all key IP-based communications protocols including SIP, MGCP, and H.323, as well as quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms such as VLAN and ToS settings. Additionally, suport for standards-based provisioning processes (HTTP, SNMP, TFTP, FTP, and Telnet) is expected to simplify the deploying and managing of large numbers of devices via remote automatic firmware upgrade, parameters configuration, and IP address management.
Interesting, and complicated.