Palm is a company worth saving.

Bono has already found what he was looking for - MONEY.

Is it not more likely that Elevation Partners, as a private equity company, has made its decision based on an assessment of Palm's business, rather than it being based on a personality clash?

And with Elevation already being a significant investor in Palm (a fact that was not mentioned in this report), an additional investment is hardy shocking.

What is perhaps surprising is that Elevation believed Palm was worth backing in the first place.

Lines like "In what will be a battle between the world's smuggest giants..." are what keep me reading this site.

I own and use the Tilt from AT&T. The command lag is horrible - right on with the "wait a random number of seconds each time i want the phone to be a phone"
I've considered the Crackberry beucase it has a speakerphone and GPS that are acutally WORTH using and have a pretty decent keyboard to type with.
I used a friends iPhone and I think it makes a better toy than a phone..

I returned to a pre-Windows Palm Treo having become well and truly fed up with the overwrought, underpowered nature of modern smartphones. Most smartphone makers use an asthmatic fat kid gulping on an inhaler as their performance benchmark, and I really don't have the patience to wait a random number of seconds each time I want the phone to perform its primary function: search the contacts list and call someone.

The pre-Windows Treos such as the 650 and 680 are magnificently fast doing such things, responding to your command the instant you tap a key or push the stylus. There really is no interface lag whatsoever. They don't need occasional restarts to recover lost resources. The keyboard is absolutely the best (i.e. fastest for typing) ever made. The battery life on the 680 is awful, and you do have to spend an extra £50 on a 2400mAh upgrade from a third party vendor such as Seidio, but it's well worth the investment: a three day standby suddenly becomes somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks.

The PalmOS might have a crap browser but it also gives you a bunch of stuff the iPhone famously omits: copy and paste, MMS, send to multiple SMS recipients, user replaceable battery (see above) and best of all I don't look like a complete nob whipping it out down the local and dragging a greasy index finger across the screen. I just sound like a nob when I bang on about how wonderful Palm used to be :^)

And that brings me to my point. If you judge the company by their recent offerings rather than by their more pioneering PalmOS based devices (which, let's not forget, enjoyed a majority share of the market for many years), whatever 'iPhone killer' they come up with will be slightly larger than an Independence Day mothership, will require a rest in its cradle every night for a recharge, and will have Sinclair ZX80 levels of screen lag.

That said, I genuinely hope they don't mess this one up. They've wasted so much time and so many millions trying to pick up the ball they dropped all those years ago, and as far as I know they've gotten nowhere. Money isn't necessarily the answer. Having a clue is.

Wounded Apple emperor to Bono:
- U2, Bono?

Probably not Bono's first right-hand Palm from Jobs.

saw palm everywhere in Panama. No iPhone.

knows apples fans like coldplay and u2.