Why I’ll Leave Palm if They Sell

UPDATE: Palm is now owned by HP, and I am very happy for both companies. Seems that they are the perfect fit, and my worries outlined in this article or no longer a concern.

The more that I hear about Palm being sold to another company, the more low-spirited I become. I bought my Palm Pre last year (on Black Friday) for one very big reason – it was a new phone made by Palm. I didn’t care that people called it the next iPK, or that the phone looked really slick; I just wanted another fantastic Palm phone to take the place of my dead Centro. I’ve used 6 different phones in the last three years, and each time I use one that is not made by Palm, I find it extremely tempting to go find another model on Craigslist that I can use. I am, what you might call, a Palm fanboy.

No doubt, the Palm webOS has made some amazing strides in becoming the best smart phone OS in recent months to be actively developed. The Homebrew Community is fantastic, the developers are pumping out very creative applications and patches, and the OS itself is getting some awesome updates pretty regularly. Even with all of that, though, my heart is with Palm the company, not Palm the Phone.

They’ve made some mistakes over the last few years, and have been put in the underdog spot pretty consistently since the iPhone, Android and Windows Series 7 Phones have been announced/released. Even after the initial announcements of the new OS early last year, when everyone was getting really excited about Palm, people were hesitant to jump in and give it their all (and soon enough the hype died down to a low murmur, giving developers no reason to stop iPhone/Android App Dev).

But with all of the problems that they have caused, it actually makes me more interested in supporting them. They seem more human, more transparent, and they more often value their community than other companies. Whatever company decides to buy them may have all of the greatest intentions of doing the right thing, but I have this bad feeling that one of the first steps taken by them will be to close off development resources from the community, use their massive patent holdings to make some easy money, and generally just put themselves in the same position as every other phone company out their; building a device for the money, not for the sake of community or innovation.

Sure, Palm wants to make money right now (everyone does), but looking at their structure and product workflow, it seems to me that they are more consumer-focused than other places. It would be a sad loss to see the company fall into the hands of another that doesn’t deserve this awesome community that Palm has built. I, for one, will probably choose to keep using my Palm phone until it dies, and then switch to another company. That is, unless Palm is revived in a quick manner or the new owner doesn’t screw the people that want to work with them.