Palm did not have a good year in 2001. The once market-commanding personal digital assistant pioneer saw its share of US retail sales plunge from 2000's 71% to 58% last year, according to the latest figures from research team NPD Techworld.
In Europe, Palm made a third of the handheld computers sold last year, down from over half the year before, market watcher IDC reports. While the blame for the decline can be laid at any number of doors - fierce trading conditions; intense price fights; the bungled launch of new PDAs leaving a mountain of unwanted older ones - Palm is clear about how it will turn the situation around: an advanced version of its eponymous operating system and a more powerful hardware platform to run it on.
The system software, Palm OS 5, was unveiled this week in San Jose at PalmSource, the company's annual shindig. The code is currently being tested before a final release "late spring or early summer", according to Steve Sakoman, chief technology office of Palm's recently spun-off Solutions Group subsidiary. Yet for such a major upgrade - it's not every day a company moves to a completely new but incompatible processor architecture, from UK-based ARM - OS 5 is surprisingly short of headline-grabbing features.
Sakoman says the enhancements focus on three key areas: communications, security and multimedia. So in comes 802.11b wireless networking, along with a Crypto Manager module that provides RC 4 data encryption and the web-derived Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to protect information sent across these wireless links. The multimedia enhancements come, says Sakoman, through a "collaboration with Sony", one of Palm's better known licensees and potential buyer of Sakoman's subsidiary, if the web's latest rumours are to be believed. The improvements include support for high-resolution colour displays, allowing Palm the opportunity to jazz up its user interface, Sakoman says.
"We've also integrated a sound manager so users can record sound and play it back through a 16-channel mixer." But the fact that there is still no support for MP3 files will be a disappointment for Palm users. That, says Sakoman, is for licensees to add, if they wish. Sony's Clié already does. That response typifies a crucial problem facing Palm's OS team: where to draw the line between the provision of a fully featured operating system and leaving not only room for licensees to add features to differentiate their products but space for third parties to add value.
But given Microsoft's drive to pack PocketPC with features, Palm runs the risk of seeming too simple. Or, indeed, underpowered. Hence the move to ARM's much faster, more sophisticated processor, away from the Motorola Dragonball line that has powered Palm OS devices to date. The adoption of the very chip that underpins almost all PocketPCs is a clear sign that Palm knows it needs to compete on speed as well as its traditional simplicity. It also allows the operating system to deliver more powerful features. Odd, then, that Palm OS 5 isn't doing so.
Or rather it is, but developers won't get the benefits directly. Written from the ground up, Palm OS 5 is a modern operating system with memory protection for greater stability, and multi-tasking and multi-threading support for enhanced perfor mance. But for now, admits Sakoman, these features are turned off' for developers. The reason? Compatibility.
"Developers don't want to freeze out owners of the 20m Palm-based PDAs out there," says Sakoman. "When a user beams an application to another user, we want to make sure that application works. So we want developers to continue to code for Dragonball." OS 5's key component, then, is the emulation system that allows old applications to run on the new processor. Apple used a similar mechanism when it launched the first PowerPC-based Macs: convert code from one processor's instruction set to the other's on the fly. With all OS routines running "100% ARM-native", Sakoman believes even old apps will run faster - though he won't specify by how much.
Over time, he says, Palm will "expose the APIs (application programming interfaces) for the new OS's core features to developers", but with ARM-based devices not expected to become available until towards the end of the year, this is likely to happen later rather than sooner - particularly given Palm's desire to delay the inevitable split between users of old technology and the new. And to avoid a drop in sales while users wait for faster, ARM-based products.
In the meantime, says Sakoman, some new OS 5 features may make it to the current version, OS 4, but that, he adds, "is up to licensees", including the hardware division of Palm. And that's the real issue: how well can Palm maintain clear blue water between its two operations and yet still hope that the hardware operation can once again take a commanding lead in the market. With the two teams' goals now separate and divergent, Palm may yet require something more than a faster processor and slick OS to regain its former glory.
