Nova: Palms Last Hope

Through a recent BusinessWeek article, long-troubled smartphone pioneer Palm revealed the reason for its apparent lack of action, as it lost ground to competitors like Nokia, RIM, and Apple. The article explained away its slide by asserting that Palm spent the last year or so retooling itself, bringing aboard former Apple executive Jon Rubenstein to refocus product development and revitalize the company’s fading fortunes.

The start of 2009 will see the results of Rubenstein’s product development team:

On Jan. 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm is due to unveil the long-awaited operating system, code-named Nova, as well as the first of a family of products that will run on it. While Palm has protected its plans with Apple-like secrecy, Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple’s iPhone, oriented to fun. “People’s work and personal lives are melding,” Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the “fat middle of the market.”

Sounds good (and it’s worth reading the full article here). But then, what I’ll be looking for once Nova launches is how open it is, relative to the widely-publicized iPhone and Android platforms. A reason why I was a die-hard fan of the old Palm OS (my first PDA was a Handspring Treo) was the sheer number of applications it could run.

It used be to a never-ending selling point for Palm that there PDAs and smartphones could run over 40,000 applications, made both by large software companies and amateur developers. And a lot of them were really useful, literally defining the mobile experience for many of us.

So a likely indicator of Nova’s—and Palm’s—success is how eagerly developers adopt it. There lies the danger, because there may not be enough room for more than one within the hearts of Palm’s old fans.