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Palm shows the way when chips are down

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 19 Dec 2001 16:08 GMT

What do you do if you wake up one morning and the world has changed? It's a question currently exercising the IT industry's finest minds, as they survey the slow-motion train crash that was 2001. For Palm, the problems are compounded. It might have created the personal digital assistant market, but competition is heating up and demand is cooling down. Palm's greatest asset -- simplicity -- no longer seems persuasive.

Not that there's anything wrong with simplicity. There was a crying need for the original Palm Pilot, a very portable device that did a few jobs very well. People loved it, and Palm loved it too -- simplicity means a cheap processor, no need to design for complex expansion, and manageable software development. Palm's competition, based around Microsoft's view of the world, had all the downsides of trying to be a true PC in the pocket: complex software, compatibility issues and lots of fiddly hardware that sucked power.

Now fast forward. Digital media happens, and people get used to the idea of carrying music, pictures and video around with them. The weaknesses of the Pocket PC start to become strengths; you can put in faster processors, more hardware and better screens, and they do things that people want. Palm, stuck with an architecture that does one job very well, found itself unable to evolve out of its once-comfortable niche.

Which makes Palm's next steps very interesting indeed. On Monday, the company announced a deal for the next generation of processors it will use in its high-end products. The winner is Texas Instruments and its OMAP range of chips: based around the world-beating ARM core, TI has added its own highly regarded digital signal processing technology. It's also developed comprehensive software libraries for digital media and wireless data, the two technologies that will drive the future of personal IT for the foreseeable future. It all runs on flea-power, does all that Java and Linux and other open standard stuff, and should make for some remarkable toys.