HP's purchase of Palm for US $1.2 billion sounds like the worst deal I have seen in years. On paper it even looks bad. Palm has 2 phones, really, neither of which has made so much as a dent in the marketplace. The company was deeply betrayed by Verizon around launch time, and has been suffering ever since. The initial forcasts at the company were for revenues in 2009 to hit $1 billion. How'd that work out for them?

It didn't. Palm's CEO emailed the whole company to inform them of as much in February. It seems as thought Palm has a reality distortion ray, perhaps brought over from Apple by Paul Mercer when Palm poached him to design the Pre. Even when the company was launching its singular product, Wall Street was cashing in and driving the stock price up to silly heights. The thing that has truly puzzled me has been why the company's public image is so healthy. After all, this is the same company that, four years ago, had only one new product in its pipeline, and it was a clam-shell, slow as molassas device designed only for dealing with email on a Treo device. An $800 dedicated email device.

Thankfully they scrapped that and went on to built the Pre, which is, honestly, a nice device. But it's just not compelling enough to rebuild a whole company around. I see even more Nokia n900's than I do Pre's, and that's a device that's also suffering from parent-company dithering.

But we can discuss Nokia's predicament later. Today, we talk of Palm. And we talk of the only thing the company really has that's of any interest, I feel: Patents. With the patents in Palm's portfolio, HP could turn itself into a one-company troll shop. But I'd imagine it won't. One thing it will be able to do, however, is crank out more Pre's with less fear of Apple litigating.

Still, $1.2 billion? Really?