Palm is expected to announce a new smart phone with "amazing" new software on Thursday, but the new hardware and new Linux-based Nova operating system will need to make a big impact. The company used to dominate the PDA market, and its Treo phone was a success, but it's now trailing badly. As SF Gate points out: "In its most recent quarter, Palm sold 599,000 smart phones, down 13% from the previous year. Apple, meanwhile, sold 6.9 million iPhones in its most recent quarter, while RIM shipped 6.7 million BlackBerrys."
CrunchGear is claiming an exclusive on some details of the new Palm phone, which "will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen." It says:
The new operating system is described as "amazing" and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality.
The problem is that this is already a crowded market. We have RIM's BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone, Google's Android/Linux, Nokia's Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, which makes five operating systems that are not going away soon. Is there really room for Palm as well?
If you look at the early-stage markets for mainframes, minis, PCs and similar devices, there were usually 50 or more contenders. These are quickly reduced to a handful at most, often with one big winner (IBM VM/MVS, Unix/Linux, Windows) and two or three stragglers. I don't see any reason why the smart phone market won't also end up with a Power Law-style distribution, with Palm among the stragglers.
