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Palm revs wireless plans with TI deal

In from the cold

Palm has revived its smartphone ambitions with a significant two-part deal with Texas Instruments. "Palm branded" devices should appear within a year promises Palm. Although Palm didn't exactly swear that these would be phones as such, and instead talked of applications such as er, biometrics, the phones logically ought to follow, as we'll see.

For thanks to TI, Palm gains both a 32-bit processor platform, OMAP, and the all-important GSM and GPRS air interfaces. The ARM-based hardware bit of OMAP has been adopted by many if not most of the 2.5G and 3G manufacturers including Nokia and Sony/Ericsson for their Symbian devices, and by Sendo for its Microsoft Stinger-based phone.

Palm will also use TI's GSM and GPRS stacks, but stopped short of a commitment to adopt its W-CDMA stack, too. W-CDMA is the air interface used by 3G phones. Traditionally the tier one handset manufacturers have brewed their own air interface stacks and jealously guarded them as their crown jewels, but times change. Motorola agreed to license its 2.5G and 3G stacks earlier this year, with Ericsson following suit. So by leaving the W-CDMA option open, Palm has left itself room to negotiate.

It's also a culturally significant move, that sees Palm belatedly come in from the cold.

Et tu

Two of Palm's most lauded smartphone deals - with Nokia and Motorola - have been canned this year. When Nokia plunged the knife into its Palm collaboration earlier this year, it made sure it gave it a good twist, too. Nokia said that the market's move towards GSM/GPRS and away from TDMA was a significant factor in abandoning the joint venture. Samsung and Kyocera have Palm-based CDMA devices for those markets that use CDMA - basically the US itself and Korea, but Palm had no GSM device to offer. And GSM is used everywhere, which makes life a lot easier for a hard-pressed manufacturer. A fact recognized by PalmOS-licensee Handspring, readying its Treo communicator which will be GSM-based to being with, shortly followed by a packet data GPRS version.

The deal doesn't specifically exclude Intel's XScale platform, which Palm has also been evaluating, but TI's software plus hardware combination evidently looked more attractive in the short-term. And Palm hasn't closed the door on XScale, which offers terrific processing advantages in the long-term.

But what is most tantalizing in Palm's announcement is the absence of a parallel software roadmap. What OS will these Palm-branded, GSM/GPRS-capable, multimedia/biometric wireless devices be running? The old PalmOS? The new ground-up 32bit PalmOS Version 5? Or BeOS? What API will the bruised Palm developer community write to next?

Er, we don't know, but some of the more colourful rumors circulating in the phone industry suggest that Steve Sakoman's band of merry men has succeeded in hosting PalmOS VMs under a modified version of BeOS. What these rumors tediously fail to tell us, thus scoring null points on the credibility meter, is on what hardware. In its final incarnation as BeIA, BeOS was an x86 OS, having been born on the Hobbit chip and migrated to PowerPC. Ideally for Palm, BeOS would by now have made the transition to ARM, thus giving it the option to tune the platform for either TI's OMAP or Intel's XScale.

Whatever wireless devices result from this alliance, they'll be worthless without applications. So Palm urgently needs to give the developers a roadmap, before they make the entirely forgivable decision to opt for richer pickings in the markets offered by Java MIDP or Symbian phones next year.

The trouble is, Palm's hardware rivals made these kind of decisions - and yesterday's kind of deal - two years ago. Which gives you some idea of the ground it needs to make up after the years of don't-worry, be-happy leadership of Carl Yankowski.

Chillingly, Palm's press release yesterday contained a Safe Harbor addendum almost as long as the announcement itself: listing factors such as "possible difficulties integrating TI's technologies into Palm's products". As we've seen from watching the travails of Symbian and Microsoft over the years, announcing alliances is the easy part. Integrating technology into a reliable device that carriers are confident won't explode their network is quite another. ®

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