Mobility Mind

The State of Palm : One Year Later

A year or so ago, Palm was busy working on it’s “third device”, something that expanded on their smartphone and PDA businesses. The third device turned out to be the Foleo, a “companion” for smartphones. Palm was also working on Nova a.k.a. the Linux-based Palm OS 2. Around this time, Engadget posted an open letter to Palm, which basically laid out what everyone was thinking : Palm was in trouble, and needed to make some drastic changes.

To their credit, Palm reacted with a public response from CEO Ed Colligan. Not long after that, Palm announced that they were canceling the Foleo in order to concentrate on just one version of the operating system.

Fast forward one year later, we’re still six months (or more) from the release of new devices with Nova. Palm has spent the year focusing on just the low end (and fortunately best selling) Centro and a succession of Windows Mobile devices.

Ryan Block, outgoing Editor In Chief of Engadget, follows up on their open letter with a report card. Out of the twelve points that Engadget brought up last year, Palm did well on 4 — and was found wanting on 8. Like most of us Palm fans, Engadget is not doing this to put Palm down, but rather to inspire Palm to “make good on its heritage of innovation”.

It’s going to be a long six months for Palm. When the new devices with Nova finally come, they will be faced with several major competitors. The iPhone would be well past 10 million units sold, Android devices would be on the market, and we may see a resurgence of devices running on the open sourced Symbian operating system.