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Man, that is a big pile of cash. It hardly seems worth it, but if HP wanted to be a player in the mobile space now they are.

But Palm has a (very long and storied) software problem, not a hardware problem. HP doesn't have much of a reputation in consumer-grade OS software development so I'm not sure how they will be able succeed where Palm failed.

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Software problem?

Though Palm Pre and Pixi didnt sell as expected, Palm's WebOS has received pretty decent feedback from all over.

They spent an eternity trying to develop a successor to the old Palm OS, then they abruptly threw it all away and created WebOS by sticking WebKit on top of a Linux kernel.

As a result, WebOS has been plagued with performance and reliability problems that they're still trying to address, and that shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with system software development.

They've also had a lot of trouble getting 3rd-party development off the ground.

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