Om Malik:

What Motorola needs to do is take a page from the Apple/RIM playbook and get vertically integrated.

And in order to do that, the company should buy Palm. As I’ve already noted, Palm has a great OS. It actually has a couple of other things going for it as well, including Jon Rubenstein and the team he’s assembled, many of whom are former Apple folks. The Palm team should do the software and Motorola’s engineers, the hardware. And when it comes to the hardware, again, it should be adopting Apple’s design and development principles, which Rubenstein must know pretty well.

I agree with Om. Handset manufacturers need to realize that they can’t just be another company building another Windows Mobile or Android device. HTC can do that only because they have clearly become both Google and Microsoft’s favorite hardware partner. But Motorola, with their flagship handset launching just 2 months before Google and HTC announce the Nexus One, needs to take a different approach.

Motorola should buy Palm because Motorola needs something that will help them stand out in the crowd, webOS would do just that.