Palm Moves Forward With Wireless Plans

After months of speculation over the direction of the Palm product road map, the company announced on Monday its choice of Texas Instruments as its processor partner for its next generation of personal digital assistants.

Although not an exclusive deal with TI, a Palm executive says that the TI Open Multimedia Applications Platform, which uses a version of the Advanced RISC Machines processor, was selected over both Intel and Motorola, also ARM licensees.

Despite Palm's reluctance to talk about future products, the selection of Dallas-based TI's OMAP family will give most Palm watchers a clear indication of where the product line is headed.

For example, TI's OMAP chip is offered as a unitary device that includes both an ARM application and a TI digital signal processor. Using such a chip, Santa Clara, California-based Palm would be able to offer a so-called converged handheld that includes both cellular capability along with personal information management applications.

As packet-based wireless networks begin to deploy, the OMAP would also allow Palm to offer devices with e-mail functionality similar to the Research In Motion BlackBerry.

Gilles Delfassey, general manager of TI's wireless division, says the companies are in fact collaborating on technology and product development as well as joint marketing for both 2.5G and 3G (third-generation) mobile Internet appliances. They are also using TI's wireless GSM/GPRS technology for the core PDA product line.

Tough Competition

One industry analyst says the move is a good first step, but says Palm will still have difficulty competing against Pocket PC devices in the enterprise.

"If you look on a month-to-month basis and talk to enterprise people who make the buying decisions, many are writing off Palm," says Tim Scannell at Mobile Insights in Mountain View, California.

According to Scannell, corporate users have been getting different stories about which way Palm is going, and what it will support.

"They still don't know if they will support Bluetooth," Scannell says. "But if this announcement is meant to help clarify their strategic position, it is a step in the right direction."

But although the OMAP processor has the capability to offer voice, streaming media, and video conferencing, neither TI's Delfassey or Todd Bradley, Palm's chief operating officer, would hint at what capabilities Palm would incorporate in new products. "We will be talking more in the second half [of 2002] about GPRS and GSM products," says Bradley.

Although there will be a new operating system based on the OMAP processor and the ARM application processor, which it also uses, Bradley says that any application created for the current operating system, 4.0, and higher, would be backward-compatible with the new OS.

In addition, TI says in a statement that it will invest $100 million to speed up the development of "OMAP-enhanced" wireless applications.