Actually every major player in the mobile phone industry has a platform. For example, Nokia has Symbian and Maemo, SE has Symbian, Apple has iPhone OS, Windows have WM6.5 and WP7, Google has Android, etc. Everyone fights for a piece of the pie. Platform is a good tool to bring in developers and lock them in. Then you will be able to sell phones, the hardware. Provided you have good content.

Having a phone is not enough and making phones for other people's platform may not make sense in the future. HTC's direction has always been to bring themselves forward and increasingly closer to retail consumers. From an OEM manufacturer to Dopod and then HTC.

Buying Palm will be a good opportunity for HTC to own a platform. We all know Palm WebOS really have some specialty there but their excellence wasn't really highlighted due to mediocre hardware. HTC has the best hardware and bringing WebOS in is a win-win situation for everyone.

In the short term, like you all said... its good to have access to some of those patents to fend off law suits. In the long term, provided Palm's problem is not deep enough, HTC will be able to stand next to people like Apple and Google. Remember that WP7 has almost locked out HTC's Sense UI. No more customizations. Meaning no more brand value even if HTC makes a phone for WP7. Everyone buys a HTC phone because of the Sense UI, not so much of what OS is underneath it. WebOS will be a good avenue for HTC to continue that direction.

This post has been edited by davidmak: Apr 13 2010, 08:21 AM