There were a lot of people asking why computer manufacturer HP would bother to pay a chunky $1.2bn for the struggling mobile company Palm beating HTC and Lenovo to the punch.  It couldn’t possibly be the phones and it isn’t: its the operating system and where that can take HP. That’s the bit of Palm that has some real legs.

People sat up and noticed when it was launched and it is one of the few out there that can give Apple, Google and more importantly Research in Motion a run for their money.

It has been years since anyone paid much attention to Palm (though the Palm Pre is a real looker — but no one bought it), but Palm webOS mobile platform is worth something if it can be plugged into a larger organisation that has the scale to make sure it goes places.

And with the $125bn HP behind it there is a chance that it will. The acquisition means HP could take a sizeable  chunk out of the “professionals” mobile market. That is bad news for RIM’s BlackBerry.

The Blackberry operating system has a lot of critics and has not had a major update for sometime, which has helped RIM see its market share to slip. Its new operating system was announced earlier this week  (BlackBerry OS 6.0 – check the video below) at its Wireless Enterprise Symposium this week.

It is a major refresh and a radical departure, but a few things here that are worth thinking about: 1) it won’t be around until the third quarter; and 2) a lot of people whether it will be enough to stop Apple taking RIM’s second position in the smartphone market; 4) Early takes say on OS 6.0 say things like: “New browser and revamped interface not enough”; 3) It could start losing out to HP/Palm.

The Palm deal is about a lot more than phones. The acquisition of Palm will allow seamless mobile integration with HP’s office products, desktops and printers, and includes a number of Palm patents. And one of the most important of these patents could be Palm’s touchscreen technology. That lays the way open for HP to develop a rival to Apple’s iPad.

What a moment to get into the market? The tablet computer market looks like it could take off like a rocket. If HP can use Palm’s software to develop a device to rival the iPad it could take a very large slice of that market.

That would be great news for the likes of Adobe. Its Flash technology might never run on the iPad, but an HP tablet computer would be a different story.

It would also do the tablet computer market wonders to have a serious rival to Apple (and at the moment that isn’t Amazon’s Kindle).