PalmSource's Shift to Smartphones

[Colin Dunstan]

Who is going to run the show in the future - PDA or smartphone? If you have followed our recent discussion, you know that despite our undisputed love for PDAs, the PDA market is having a tough time these days, while the smartphone segment is heating up (research firm IDC projects that smartphone shipments worldwide will reach 90 million in 2008, up from roughly 17 million this year).

So far Symbian has dominated the smartphone market. I personally hate Symbian. It is slow and it doesn't offer the flexibility that I know from more advanced operation systems like Palm OS. Fortunately or not (depends on how you see the future), PalmSource is slowly shifting towards smartphones now, as newest licensing arrangements with smartphone players like Kyocera and Samsung reveal.

Today I found an interesting NYT article which states that PalmSource plans to announce tomorrow its first operating system designed specifically for smartphones. PalmSource said its software would be available in 11 smartphones without naming the manufacturers.

"We are reinventing the company," said David Nagel, PalmSource's chief executive, in an interview during a recent European tour. The company is betting that the same ease of use that made the Palm a popular hand-held organizer will draw people to phones using the software.

In other words, PalmSource clearly wants to be part of the smartphone hype. Let's only hope that it won't abandon its original roots and leave palmOne without a future operation system.