Evidently the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer took one look at Palm’s (PALM) books and decided an acquisition isn’t worth the trouble. “There just weren’t enough synergies to take the deal forward,” a source close to talks between the two companies told Reuters.

And so speculation about a potential acquirer is turning elsewhere. Lenovo seems to be the leading candidate at the moment. The company has big aspirations in China’s mobile market and a penchant for making big foreign acquisitions. It purchased IBM’s (IBM) ThinkPad business a few years back and tried to buy Packard Bell, so why not Palm?

Well, for one thing, Palm’s market share is too small to be of real benefit to Lenovo. For another, the company is already committed to Google’s (GOOG) Android for the OS to run on its soon-to-debut Lephone.

Finally, Palm’s asking price is said to be around $1.3 billion. Lenovo had about $2.4 billion in net cash reserves on hand the end of 2009. Would Lenovo really spend more than half of that on Palm, a company whose books frightened off HTC? As Larry Dignan writes at ZDNet, it’s hard to make the case that it should.

So if not Lenovo, then who?

How about Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)? With handheld sales that fell by more than half year-over-year in its first quarter, HP is surely looking for a way to revive them and capture a larger portion of the important mobile market. Acquiring Palm could be a good way to do it. Here’s why:

• Yes, HP is a Windows shop with, no doubt, big plans for Windows Phone 7, but that OS will likely figure in devices aimed at the enterprise market. With Palm’s assets, HP could target the consumer space as well.
• Palm’s webOS is scalable. HP could use it in other devices–tablets, for example–differentiating them from those of competitors using open-source operating systems like Android.
• In Palm, HP would gain a turnkey smartphone division–a venture with a slick smartphone OS, a deep mobile patent portfolio, a talented R&D team, the beginnings of an app ecosystem and established carrier relationships.
• Palm and HP both call Silicon Valley home, and former Palm exec Todd Bradley currently heads up HP’s Personal Systems Group. Obviously, there would still be integration risks, but there are clear synergies in culture and location that would at least temper them a bit.
• HP has some $14 billion in cash on hand, more than enough to cover Palm’s rumored $1.3 billion asking price with plenty left over.

That seems to me to be a pretty compelling case. Has it been made inside HP? I can’t say for sure, though we may find out in the weeks ahead.

And once Acer does that, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)–the world’s largest PC maker by shipments–best start watching its back. Said Lanci: “I would expect not only to pass Dell very soon, but also to breach the gap with HP.”

Have Acer’s buyouts of Gateway and Packard Bell gone to Lanci’s head? Perhaps just a little. That said, the company has seen quite a bit of growth thanks to the netbook phenomenon, which shows no signs of abating.

Little wonder then that PC manufacturer Acer, which has been looking to expand its nominal market share in the states, said this morning it will purchase Gateway for $710 million. Quite a sum for a struggling PC maker, but from Acer’s perspective, money well spent. Aside from making the Tawainese company the world’s third largest PC vendor, the acquisition gives it right of first refusal to buy Packard Bell, which it plans to excercise ruining its rival Lenovo’s plans to acquire the European company. “The company that loses the most from this is Lenovo,” said JP Gownder, a PC analyst at Forrester Research. “Acer is saying [it's] going to be a world player. That is a huge stake in the ground.”