A quick timeline:
November 2006: Ed Colligan, chief executive of Palm (that's the company which sells the Palm and Treo handhelds, which run PalmOS and Windows Mobile), says of the rumours of Apple's iPhone: "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone... PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." (See John Gruber's analysis: "I'm not sure what I like best about it... Is it the way he describes Apple as "PC guys"? As in like, These guys just make computers, they don't understand the nuances of user interface and experience design, especially with regard, to, uh, handheld consumer electronics. Nope, no handheld consumer electronics expertise at Apple. By the way, let me show you how my Treo can play MP3s! Or is it the fact that Palm is using Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS on some of its Treo phones? Apple, they're just "PC guys", but Microsoft, they're connoisseurs of elegant UI design, apparently.")
January 2007: Apple launches iPhone, a smartphone. Release dates are vague. Apple stock rises 15% immediately on the announcement; Palm's stock falls 5%.
April 9: Dell announces it's not going to sell its Axim handheld (introduced in 2002) any more, amidst stagnating sales of handhelds.
April 10: Colligan announces that Palm has been working in-house on "a new Linux and open source based mobile computing platform combined with Palm OS Garnet technology" that will be released "on new products later this year".
April 11: Stock in Palm ticks up, very slightly - it's risen 20% since the iPhone announcement.
But everyone wonders when, if ever, Palm is going to get anything resembling an act together on operating systems. There was a time when if you were thinking about mobile handheld computing, you'd think of Palm. Everyone carried Palm Pilots. Well, everyone who was anyone. Then it was sort of cool to upgrade to Treos, except they were pricey. And the Blackberry grabbed the corporate market while Palm was looking in the other direction, having failed to grasp the idea of "secure corporate email" on the move. And Microsoft made Windows Mobile better - better than Palm's own operating system offering. (We'll spare you the details of how Palm split into bits.)
Our conclusion: Dell doesn't think there's enough money in handhelds. Palm can't get its OS act together. Everything's in smartphones - and Palm has a big battle to persuade people it can do that better than Apple, even though Apple's product isn't even out yet.
