The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.
To diversify further away, earlier this year HP acquired Palm, the proprietary PDA-smartphone maker, to launch its own-branded smartphones, effectively competing directly against Nokia, Apple, Motorola, Samsung and Dell.
It is not clear how many copies it sold before HP and Palm but WebOSNation, which monitors the use of Palm smartphones, estimates it was downloaded only 84 times before it was pulled.
In April 2010, when HP acquired Palm, webOS developers were relieved the company had been saved, but wary about the changes the computing giant was likely to make to an operating system originally built for cellphones.
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After receiving the offers from A and B, Palm told HP that it wouldn't give it an exclusivity period unless it improved its offer, and HP declined.
Lawyers for the 71-year-old singer - real name Ernest Evans - filed a "cease and desist" order against HP and its subsidiary Palm in September 2012, soon after the app became available.
Palm was most interested in HP and Companies A and B, while C and D initially only wanted to acquire Palm's patents.
Acquiring Palm should help HP take on these challengers more effectively.
The phone felt slightly fuller in the hand compared to the recent glut of sub-10mm devices, measuring in at just under 12mm thick, but like Palm's HP's now defunct Pre range, it's a very comfortable fit in the hand.
As Palm and then HP found to their cost with WebOS (we could very easily put OpenWebOS into this list of pretenders to the throne), as Blackberry found with the PlayBook, and as even Microsoft has confronted with Windows Phone.
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There is no doubt that HP is getting a large patent portfolio, a strong team of engineers, and a proprietary operating system in Palm webOS, and it is reasonable to assume that HP did not have other ways to acquire such assets for less than the price it is paying for Palm.
Time elapsed between the founding of Palm Computing and when HP closed up shop? 18 years.
And HP just bought the wreckage of Palm so that it would have a better mobile operating system with which to compete against Apple.
HP, with its webOS operating system from Palm, was another member of this group up until Thursday afternoon.
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The Palm boys saw their future foreclosed at HP and bolted for the exits.
In January 2012, Jon Rubinstein, former top engineer at Apple and then CEO at Palm, left Hewlett-Packard (HP) after serving his 24 months.
To help share development costs of webOS and expand the market for its developers, HP has warmed to the idea of licensing the Palm-developed operating system.
Equally HP could have made hay with Motorola, ditching Palm and its OS, picking up immediate traction in Android products, following case studies like Samsung that would give executives their bearings in this new world.
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They have already endured a series of disappointments as the mobile operating system ran into obstacles under its creator, Palm, and then under its acquirer, HP.
Hewlett-Packard is said to have killed the Slate, which was to be based on Microsoft's Windows, and is now reportedly working on a tablet using an operating system from Palm, the smart-phone maker that HP recently bought.
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In a conference call outlining the deal, HP executives stressed the points of commonality between their company and Palm.
Printing from the Palm was an option only with an expensive Bluetooth-enabled HP printer I didn't happen to have.
In a new wrinkle, HP also said it is discontinuing production of WebOS devices, basically killing the Palm hardware business.
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Some expressed sympathy for HP employees, particularly Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who joined a revitalized Palm in 2007 and became its CEO in 2009.
FORBES: webOS Developers Bewildered By HP Decision To Drop Hardware
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) stream of acquisitions in the early 2000, including the acquisition of Compaq Computer and Palm Inc. that supposed to help the company compete effectively against Dell Computer (NASDAQ:DELL) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is another case in point with the acquisition of Compaq Computer, HP rode the declining trend of the PC market, while with the acquisition of Palm Inc.
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The Palm deal has not yet closed, but executives may offer further granularity about HP's plans to integrate Palms webOS operating system into future devices.
Despite those growth prospects as well as the migration toward higher priced smartphones from mobile phones, in August 2011 HP announced plans to kill the TouchPad and WebOS smartphone business it acquired when it bought Palm in April-2010.
Unfortunately for fans of Palm's last hurrah, the project's webOS port died with the HP Touchpad.
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