Palm's business shenanigans have always been fascinating, but usually with a negative effect on its products. Witness the destructive Palm vs Palm battle when Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins defected to found HandSpring (subsequently reabsorbed, along with its hit Treo smartphone) or the stumbling split into Palm hardware and Palm software divisions (a development now superseded by the the re-re-united Palm's latter-day conversion to Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS).
But the latest development is intriguing, and on the face of it very positive. Palm's Australia-New Zealand Country Manager Olivier Rozay was in here earlier this week to show off two new handsets. I can't tell you anything about those (both are under nondisclosure until mid-October).
But Rozay did point out that Palm's shareholders have just approved the sale of 25% of the company to Elevation Partners - a private equity outfit that's named after a song written by its most famous board member: U2's Bono.
So what's next: the U2 Treo? Probably something much more radical, as part of Elevation's deal was even more tantalising: the appointment of Jonathan Rubinstein - formerly head of Apple's iPod division and one of the original movers behind the iPhone - as Palm's new chairman.
Good stuff. It's time for some new thinking at Palm. The Treo was - and is - one of the best tech products of the past decade. But Jeff Hawkins latest trick - a stripped down notebook called the Foleo (left, with Hawkins) - drew derision and was scrapped, at a cost of $10 million, almost immediately after its launch.
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