Users to get read on Palm's future

All these pressures will come to bear on newcomer David Nagel, CEO of the recently formed Palm OS subsidiary, who makes his first appearance this week before thousands of Palm developers and partners. The audience will look for evidence Palm still has a vision of handheld computing that relates to the needs of enterprise network users.

Observers expect Nagel to lay out a clear roadmap for the transition of the current Palm OS to a 32-bit chip architecture and detail how Palm will address nagging security issues, improve wireless connectivity and ensure that its products work better with corporate databases and applications.

One major announcement for developers will be the release of reference applications for the Palm OS. A joint effort by Palm, Kada Systems, Oracle, Sybase and Hexaware Technologies, the applications use embedded databases, and Kada's synchronization software and APIs to let developers more quickly build custom applications for line-of-business functions such as customer relationship management.

"Palm used to have the opportunity to command the enterprise [market]," says Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner. "But it lost that through bad management." Dulaney cites the spinoff from parent 3Com, Palm's IPO and several top-level turnovers, all in less than five years, as culprits.

"The PocketPC is interesting to enterprise IT because it ties in well with Microsoft software," Dulaney says. "What Palm has to do now is view Microsoft as less of an enemy and, instead, build systems that tie into Microsoft [platforms already entrenched in the enterprise]."

"Palm has had an unwavering commitment to the enterprise, but the focus has been fragmented," says Kevin Burden, an analyst for IDC.

Take security, for example. Palm announced last November that RSA Security's highly regarded encryption software would be associated in some way with "future versions" of the Palm OS. But Palm never spelled out what that would mean. Today, security for Palm applications in the enterprise remains a matter a stitching together an array of products and technologies.

For a range of enterprise applications, the Palm OS doesn't have the muscle that's needed. Multithreading, which lets an operating system simultaneously handle an array of tasks, will finally be introduced with the ARM-based Palm OS.

"Proper multitasking will allow a more stable system, and allow a new breadth of network/wireless applications to appear," says Russell Bulmer, a software engineer, and long-time Palm user, with Conigma, a wireless services start-up in London.

Bulmer and others expect Palm will include with the ARM-based Palm OS an emulator that will let users run existing Palm applications on the ARM devices, which are likely to appear in the latter half of the year.