Report: Palm To Introduce New OS At CES 2009?

Ed Sutherland ()

moov4/Flickr)

(Credit: moov4/Flickr)

Palm, the Treo maker that has seen its profits crater and U.S. marketshare dwindle, is promising to stage a comeback at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show. The company plans to unveil a new operating system and handset, according to BusinessWeek.

Although details are sparse, Palm will “finally unveil an oft-delayed new operating system, as well as the first in a new family of smartphones,” unnamed sources told the magazine.

The tip may refer to Palm’s Linux-based software Nova, which the company had said it would introduce in 2008, then pushed back to sometime next year.

The report said the new smartphone promises to be “different than anything on the market” and will help “consumers easily meld work and play,” Roger McNamee of private equity company Elevation Partners told write Peter Burrows. In 2007, Elevation gave Palm $325 million for a stake in the company.

Former Apple hardware leader Jon Rubinstein is now Palm’s executive chairman. McNamee said Palm looks to Apple for a model on building a company revival based on popular products.

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BusinessWeek said Palm doesn’t have unlimited time to turnaround. The company has enough cash ($215 million) to last around six quarters.

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About the author

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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  • firesign

    palm would have to do something earthshatteringly stupendous to even have a hope of becoming relevant again.

  • imajoebob

    It’s so late in the game that the only way they’ll come back is if it runs OS X. And I still love my ancient Palm Pilot. Good enough shouldn’t be good enough for a PDA. And very few phones can match the Palm. Even with the creaky old OS.

  • http://www.gearsandwidgets.com/ phoenix

    Likelihood aside, Palm OS is so moldy that if they don’t do something soon, Palm is going to die an early death. The Centro was a nice lifeline, but now its starting to be plagued with reliability problems, and sure enough it’s at the bottom of the price heap like the Treo. Don’t get me wrong – the Centro and the Treo are both great devices, but the moldy Palm OS is holding both of them back significantly.

    Come to think of it, the best thing Palm could do at this point is open up their phones to Android and announce they’re working to make their apps support it.

  • DAVID OWENS

    I’ve owned a million palm pilots, and lost a million stylus. The palm is so last century.