14 DAY TRIAL // Back in 2010, Palm allowed HP to perform a full takeover. Its CEO, Jon Rubinstein, allowed the maneuver in the hope that Palm would be able to get a second wind, helped by HP financing.
Unfortunately, after some arguably half-hearted attempts at making a Palm tablet, HP shut down the division entirely.
The webOS operating system fell into obscurity and there's only some open source code of it left now, drifting along the waters of the Internet.
Jon Rubinstein recently spoke to Fierce Wireless and revealed his regrets over having allowed that acquisition to happen. He feels that the outcome completely defeated the purpose of selling Palm in the first place.
“Talk about a waste,” he said. “If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?”
Most of Palm's products have been sold by HP to LG. WebOS might make a comeback in TVs, but that's a far cry from what the OS was meant for.