The Future of PalmSource

PalmInfocenter.com: PalmSource Broadens Product Portfolio: "'Our strategy is to provide customers a full spectrum of operating system software and applications for phones and mobile devices,' said David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, Inc. 'In addition to Palm OS? Garnet and Palm OS? Cobalt, we are now providing customers with operating system software for both smartphones and feature phones. We're also offering three new versions of one of the most popular applications for phones-MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), an email client and a micro browser.'

Available now, the new product offerings from PalmSource are:

* PalmSource mFone for Smart Phones
A complete Smart Phone platform that includes everything from the GUI, to device drivers, network protocols, development tools, and end-user applications such as a browser, PIM functions, email, SMS, MMS, MP3 players, games. mFone for Smart Phones is designed to run on Linux operating system distributions.

* PalmSource Feature Phone
A Man Machine Interface (MMI) for Feature Phones that includes a GUI engine and applications such as phone dialer, SMS, MMS, Address Book, PIM, and WAP browser, essentially all that is needed for a Feature Phone user interface. mFone for Feature Phones is designed to run on any Real Time Operating System (RTOS) such as Nucleus and VRTX.

* PalmSource mMMS
An enhanced short message service for mobile phones that enables transmission of graphics, video clips, and sound files. This version developed by PalmSource is a full-featured MMS client for Smart Phones, Feature Phones, and other wireless devices. It is designed to enable users to easily and efficiently receive, send, browse, create, and edit multimedia messages on handheld terminals. It complies with the OMA 2.0 MMS standard and can be ported to most Smart Phone, Feature Phone or wireless device.

* PalmSource mBrowser
A multi-mode micro browser optimized for Smart Phones, Feature Phones, and other wireless devices. The browser is designed to be compact, fast, and supports both WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and HTML. By supporting multiple standards, this WAP browser from PalmSource is significantly more useful than many micro browsers because it can access all Internet content, not just WAP enabled sites."

Just phone stuff, right? Yes and no.

This gives PalmSource the opening to do for the cell phone market (and think about the global numbers here) what Tivo did for home video recording. Remember the flashing 12:00 on the VCR jokes? Don't hear them anymore , do you? Because Tivo gave people a new and very easy user interface and made using the advanced features simple.

Most consumers today don't know how to use the features in the phones they have. Why? Because the interfaces suck. There's no standardization and most of the features aren't easily discoverable. That's where PalmSource can provide a standardized user experience from basic phones through features phones to smartphones. Can you imagine picking up a cell phone and already knowing what do expect? How to dial, save a number, send an SMS, hotsync it to your PC?

PDAs are NOT going away, but they will continue to be a niche market. Phones are the next great frontier for PalmSource, and they're positioned to change the way you think about mobile communications.