HP has its hands full In taking on Palm

Sorry to throw cold water on what might otherwise be a great celebration for those who love Hewlett-Packard, love Palm and love the fact that they are now merging, but it's far from a slam dunk that the combination of both companies will be a success.

Make no mistake: Both HP and Palm bring to the table brilliant and visionary approaches to computing, mobility and network access, in addition to technology that is absolutely compelling. In the past few months alone, here in the CRN Test Centre, we've given strong praise to both the Palm Pre Plus (as one of the great products of 2010 so far) as well as HP's TouchSmart 9100 PC - - which has by far the best implementation of multi-touch technology of any desktop PC we've ever seen.

While Apple has been off to the races with its iPad and a sneak peak at the forthcoming iPhone 4.0 operating system, the technologies and approaches that both Palm and HP bring to the table could pose a great threat to Steve Jobs' company in Cupertino. But there are several potential quagmires looming for HP in all of this:

For starters, customer expectations for smartphones are a world apart from their expectations for PCs. Call drops at the wrong time? Blame the vendor. Battery life too short? Blame the vendor. Can't sync with precisely the right, custom data application back at the main office? Blame the vendor. Lose the phone while taking the kids to Chuck E Cheese's for a birthday party? Blame the vendor. HP is about to experience new customer expectations in a big way;