Will Palm prove me wrong?

January 6th, 2009 15:42 UTC by John ·

In November I lamented the coming demise of Palm, based on the long series of mistakes made in developing the successor to PalmOS (“Garnet”), now being called “Nova.”

Apparently, quite a few people are impressed with Nova – Elevation Partners injected $100 Million Dollars shortly before the end of the year, and details are beginning to leak out about the new OS and device. TechCrunch is quoting insiders as calling the OS “amazing“. Ryan Block is “excited about the possibility of ditching my iPhone“. Mobile Industry Insider has an interesting graphic (based on the CrunchGear image, but expect the actual product to look more like a portrait-format Treo Pro):

Palm Nova

Clearly, Palm has to knock this one out of the park. The iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile have consolidated their market positions, and Android is evolving as more than just a phone OS, being ported to netbooks.

Even if the new OS and device impress everyone, will it be enough? Can Palm carve out a place for Nova in the connected-device market when carriers want to support fewer, not more, operating systems? To survive, Nova will have to be better than Android and/or the iPhone, and be capable of reviving the Foleo concept.