小径通幽处…

A
few new Palm OS devices debuted early in the year. The often delayed
Fossil FX2008 wristwatch PDA came to market. Garmin released the iQue
3600a, a GPS handheld designed for aviation, and the Qool QDA-700
became available in some European and Asian markets.

February
In
February PalmSource formally completed their acquisition of
ChinaMobileSoft. PalmSource acquired the company to leverage the work
CMS has done with Linux to provide a new version of Palm OS based on
Linux.

In GSPDA news, the company brought the M68 smartphone to
Europe. The company also announced they would bring out a Palm OS
Cobalt smartphone by the end of 2005. A claim which was again restated
during PalmSource\\\’s developer conference in May, however to date no
manufacturer has announced a Cobalt device and none will likely ever.

Eight
months after exiting the US and European PDA markets, Sony put the
rumors to rest and officially announced there would be no more Clie
handhelds in Japan or anywhere else.

March
In
March, industrial handheld maker Symbol announced they had renewed
their Palm OS license, however no new devices have been released by the
company in a number of years.

Also in the beginning of the March
a pair of mystery Treo\\\’s surfaced. These images were the first sign of
the impending Apocalypse Windows Mobile Treo. palmOne also announced
another positive quarter and the opening of a new Smartphone
engineering center in Dublin. PalmInfocenter also posted its Treo 650
review.

April
In April palmOne
released the Tungsten E2 handheld. This update to one of the company\\\’s
top selling models included a brighter color screen, flash memory and
Bluetooth. Meanwhile rumors and speculation about the upcoming
LifeDrive were rampant.

In a strange twist of fate, a company
debuted a Palm OS emulator for Microsoft Pocket PC\\\’s. Dubbed StyleTap,
the new product allows most applications originally written for Palm OS
handhelds to run on Windows Mobile-based PDAs.

May
In
May the palmOne LifeDrive officially debuted. The LifeDrive was the
first Palm OS PDA with a built in hard drive. It featured a 4GB
hard-drive for storage, a 320x480 high-resolution color screen, and
both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. R

Just a day before the PalmSource
developer conference got underway, PalmSource CEO David Nagel resigned
his position. Senior VP Patrick McVeigh stepped up as interim CEO,
while the company has yet to name a permanent replacement.

The
PalmSource DevCon was a very well attended event as the company showed
its first glimpses of Palm OS for Linux. Even a Palm OS Cobalt phone
was being shown.

palmOne announced at the conference that they
had renewed their Palm OS license through 2009. But the big news was
that the company worked out a licensing deal with PalmSource to
reacquire the rights to use the Palm brand and name.

Summer
The
summer months saw the news slow down, with a number of software devices
updates here and there. Rumors of a new Tungsten model first showed up.

In
PalmSource news, the company announced a slight profit from the Palm
trademark sale and also announced layoffs, cutting 16% of its staff.
The company also announced one of its first new licensees in some time,
as LG Electronics signed an agreement to develop Palm OS based
smartphones. PalmSource also revealed that they were shifting all
engineering efforts on the future Linux based versions of the Palm OS.
The company also put a timetable on its release, stating the version
for low end and feature phones is planned to be completed by summer
2006 and a high end version for smartphones is expected to be ready in
the second half of 2006.

In July the big news was that palmOne
was now officially back to Palm Inc. Palm unveiled their new orange
logo and promised new Palm products in the fall.

The summer also
saw Tapwave shutting down. The company discontinued their Zodiac
handheld business failing to ever grab a significant slice of the
portable gaming market amid strong competition from Nintendo and Sony.

Jeff
Hawkins made some news when he began to drop hints about his next big
invention in development. Hawkins began talking about Palm\\\’s secret
third business involving the next major generation of mobile computing.

August
also saw a big return to the Windows Mobile Treo rumors. A video of it
in action was posted, Palm\\\’s CFO told the media that \\\”CIOs don\\\’t get
fired for using Microsoft products\\\” and we learned that HTC would be
manufacturing the device. What was years ago totally unthinkable
started to appear almost certain.

In Palm OS device news, the
GSPDA Xplore M98 smartphone began shipping. Intel also announced their
next generation XScale chips code-named \\\”Monahans\\\”. A pre-production
Monahans chip running at 1.25 GHz was demonstrated palying back a HD
quality video on a PDA.

September
In
September the latest bomb was dropped in the ongoing PalmSource saga.
Japanese mobile software company ACCESS announced they would acquire
PalmSource in a deal valued at $324 million dollars. ACCESS pledged to
make PalmSource a wholly owned subsidiary and would help the company
continue work on Palm OS for Linux. We later learned that Palm and
Motorola had both put in bids for PalmSource.

Then in late
September it finally happened. Confirming months and months of rumors,
speculation and flame wars, Palm and Microsoft jointly announced at a
press conference with Ed Colligan and Bill Gates that Palm has licensed
the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system for an expanded line of
Treo smartphones. The Treo 700w was to debut on the Verizon network in
early 2006. The future would never be the same again.

October
With
many longtime Palm OS users still in shock, October got off to a bang
with Palm releasing two new Palm OS PDAs. The Z22 is Palm\\\’s first sub
$100 entry level color handheld in a small and light package designed
to go after the paper organizer market. The Palm TX handheld was
released to positive reviews, featuring a 320x480 pixel screen and both
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Later that month, PiTech announced they had
developed a 3 megapixel Palm OS smartphone. The GSM smartphone features
an auto-focus camera, a quad band wireless radio with EDGE data support
and a QVGA display and Bluetooth. It is expected to launch in Europe
and Asia in the second quarter of 2006.

November
November
opened up with Palm denying a rumor that they were working on a Symbian
OS Treo. Palm also announced that they continue to open new retail
stores including five new ones in California. Palm CEO Ed Colligan also
released a letter reaffirming Palms commitment to the future of the
Palm OS amid growing speculation that the company was moving away from
its long time operating system.

We also learned for the first
time that Palm has a number of new Treos in the works. An investment
company released a report detailing that Palm was working on new models
including a new high end design code-named Hollywood and a possible
entry level Treo model code-named Lowrider.

November was also the
month that saw ACCESS completing their acquisition of PalmSource.
PalmSource is now a wholly owned subsidiary of ACCESS and is no longer
a publicly traded company.

December
In
the last month of 2005 Palm announced very profitable quarter, its
eigth consecutive quarter of year over year double digit revenue
growth. Strong Treo 650 and handheld sales helped to boost the
company\\\’s bottom line. Palm also officially revealed that they will
announce three new smartphones in 2006.

We\\\’re looking forward to 2006!