Mobile Rumours

Palm
It doesn’t take a Mastermind to recognise that Palm is in trouble. It banked that its Palm Pre and Pixi smartphones could compete with Apple and BlackBerry and caught a cold.

Speculation is now about who could step in a buy them with companies such as Dell, HP and Nokia being muted. According to the Reuters news agency, Palm hired bankers last week to explore options for the firm, including a sale of the company.
The big question is why anyone would buy them given that the desirable asset, its webOS operating system, may be its Achilles heel. With many others fighting for space why by a failure irrespective of how good it was once rated. Why not just go Anroid.

In 6 months, Palm's stock has dropped 69%. It has a stock market value of $870m (£563m), but it's shares rose more than 17% on the reports of a possible sale.

Tablets
We now have rumours of a Blackberry Tablet and why not? A number of sources claim that RIM has placed an order with supplier Hon Hai, the company who produces the Kindle screen, for 8.9" displays for use in a tablet. If RIM want to head off corporate deflectors moving to Apple they have to have a tablet offer for that paperless office.

In other tablet news Qualcomm Technologies has been working on a special technology capable of bringing high-quality colour without the need for backlighting or colour filters. The Mirasol is based on a reflective MEMS-based technology, called interferometric modulation (IMOD). The technology uses low amounts of power and is highly reflective. The screen is a 5.7” XGA colour display that should soon enter the ebook and the tablet-PC markets.