It's nice for a change to be on a Palm watch, as opposed to the Apple watch that is typical this time of year. Seems like there is a lot of buzz about Nova and Palm's upcoming announcement.
The CrunchGear post titled "Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen" by John Biggs seems to have attracted the most attention. He wrote, "We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen."
And regarding Palm's Nova, it was a cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle's business section on Sunday by Ryan Kim, titled: "Palm needs Nova to shine." That's a pretty big deal for a SF newspaper that tends to leave Palm news to AP writers.
In response to my previous post, a reader offered this link which shows he actually thinks about the new Palm OS as being potentially friendly to Web-based apps:
"I think the new Palm OS with regards to third party apps will pick up where Apple left off with web apps. While everyone slammed Apple for initially introducing web apps as the primary mode of 3rd party apps on Mobile devices, the idea has a lot of merit, but Apple botched this idea badly. I think Palm will show the full potential and actually do it the right way."
Back to Ryan Kim's story, he referenced a write-up in BusinessWeek by Peter Burrows. In particular, that story talks about the arrival Jon Rubenstein. AKA "the Podfather", and how he is guiding Palm towards the fat middle of the market:
"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."
So yeah, there's tons of speculation. My recommendation is you stay tuned right here to TreoCentral because Dieter Bohn will be covering the Palm event live, so you'll be able to get near real-time information about what Palm is really doing.
Note: Pic at top via CrunchGear. With a tad of photo doctoring.
