This week Palm mentioned two future devices, one which is expected in August or September and the other by the end of this year. Sadly though Palm has stumbled onto some blocks.
First, the Treo 650 will stop shipping in Europe because of new hazardous waste
regulations that are taking effect that the phone does not comply
with. Palm is feverously working to ready its next devices currently
codenamed "Lennon" and "Nitro" to Europe and US markets as soon as it possibly can,
but the company didn"t have any release dates available during the call. Not a
lot of information is available about the new devices planned by Palm, but we
do know that Nitro will be based off on the PalmOS and Lennon will run Windows
Mobile 2005. It also looks like non-phone Palm products probably won"t last much longer as LifeDrive
wasn"t the product Palm was hoping it would be and hasn"t sold as well as
projected. This is further supported by comments made by Palm CEO Ed Colligan,
indicating that the company continues to refocus on its smartphone products.
Palm"s non-smartphone handhelds and other device sales numbers have also steadily
declined over the last four years from 100% of sales in 2003 to only 25% of
sales today.
There were also some other comments made during the call that lead us
to
believe that PalmOS may be on the way out. According to Palm,
developing for two separate operating systems is too expensive, and
more devices coming to market continue to ship with Windows Mobile.
Although the change isn"t
reflected in Palm"s current device roadmap, the company mentioned that
it would make sense. RIM devices run on RIM OS and although it faces
heavy competition from Microsoft, RIM devices have a good deal of
enterprise level penetration. From the sounds of things, Palm is in the
same ballpark as other mobile smartphone
makers. Try as it might, Palm doesn"t seem like it"s gaining much
headway against RIM and the Blackberry in the enterprise and business
markets. With this in mind, we could be witnessing an entire new line
of products from Palm shipping with Windows Mobile.