Will Palm revitalise its old platform?

Palm’s agreement to buy a perpetual licence for Palm OS from Access Systems earlier this month shows that there is still life in the old platform yet. However, it also brings to a close a period in the handheld maker’s history during which many observers wondered if the company would survive at all.

In 2002, Palm separated its Palm OS developers from its hardware engineers, creating a software division called PalmSource. The following year, the division was spun off as a separate company and the remaining hardware business changed its name to PalmOne.

Today, the company is again called Palm after buying back the rights to the name from PalmSource, which is now part of Access Systems. With a perpetual licence for Palm OS, the company has also effectively brought development of its entire platform back in-house.

However, the market is now a very different place from when Palm first started making PDAs. The traditional PDA has all but vanished, turning into a wireless handheld or replaced by the smartphone. Palm’s own best-selling models are currently its Treo phones, for example.

Palm OS has changed little since version 5 shipped, while rivals such as Symbian OS and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have both seen at least two major updates. Can the venerable Palm platform still cut the mustard?

Many industry observers (myself included) wrote off Palm OS when the news broke that Palm was developing a handset using Microsoft’s platform. It seemed almost inevitable that Palm would become just another OEM making Windows Mobile handsets.

Palm might also have turned to Access, which earlier this year unveiled the Access Linux Platform (ALP), a heavily re-worked version of Palm OS designed to run on top of embedded Linux. Instead, Palm has said that its future strategy will depend on just Windows Mobile and the trusty old Palm OS.

When Palm launched the Treo 750v, company executives said it was built for Windows Mobile because this offers a better fit with the corporate infrastructure of most large organisations.

Does this mean that Palm OS has a future in business products, or will it be relegated to models aimed at consumers? Palm has not answered this, but when the Treo 680 with Palm OS was launched last month, the firm simply stated it was “designed to attract new users in the smartphone and feature-phone markets through affordability, ease of use and style.”

Will we see any new corporate products based on Palm OS? We shall have to wait and see what Palm has up its sleeve.