There’s a Nova in Palm’s future. In January, the famed-but-faded mobile-device maker will unveil a new operating system with that code name at the Consumer Electronics Show.
According to Business Week and others, Palm’s hiring last year of ex-Apple engineer Jon Rubinstein has led to a new team that hopes to guide the company back to the ranks of mobile innovation.
Falling Behind
The maker of the original Palm PDA and the Treo smartphone has fallen behind its competitors in recent years. Observers have been waiting for Palm to unveil a new operating system based on Linux, since the existing platform hasn’t been updated in years.
A lot is riding on this launch. At the beginning of this month, the company said its sales would be half what analysts were projecting for the quarter, and laid off about 10 percent of its workforce.
The Nova OS will be shown at the CES show Las Vegas on Jan. 8, as will initial releases in a forthcoming family of products. Reports indicate that the launch will include a new user interface and possibly one or more new devices.
Nova is expected to be on the market by the middle of next year. Curiosity is running high as observers try to gauge what the company could offer that would put them back in the game with such major innovators as Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, and devices using Google’s open-source Android mobile platform.
Some observers have speculated that Nova will be designed to be more of an intelligent assistant, such as reminding you of weather reports in a city to which you’ll be traveling, as indicated on your calendar. Others are suggesting it will take the mobile Internet to new levels.
iPhone Clone ‘Doomed to Fail’
Avi Greengart, an analyst for industry research firm Current Analysis, said the challenge for…