Tero Kuittinen:

The surprise revelation that Oracle considered buying RIMM and Palm as a way to enter the smartphone business already seems like a window to another era. The recent travails of Palm, LG,  HTC and RIM may have effectively closed the door on any major M&A moves in the industry.</p><p>

The difficulty of buying and integrating a mobile handset vendor started becoming obvious way back in the mists of time, when Philips and Lucent tried merging their mobile phone operations. The result was a $2.5 B platinum turkey that has by now been mercifully forgotten. Most of the resulting phones were so clunky only a Dutchman could love them – pale imitations of vintage Ericsson models.

He makes the very good point that there hasn't been a single successful handset merger or takeover: "the phone market simply shifts too rapidly for any such maneouvre to work."

Can anyone offer even one counterexample?

And Boy Genius Report goes back to the drawing board.

"It's rare for the FCC to seek an administrative hearing on merger deals like this. Holding such a hearing adds an additional layer of review and extends the time the agency looks at the deal. The last time the agency did this was in 2002 on the proposed merger of EchoStar and DirecTV. The companies eventually pulled the deal."