MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.-The battle between Handspring Inc. and Palm Inc. rose to a new fevered pitch this week as Handspring announced a spate of new services and applications for its personal digital assistants, a move that comes just one week after both companies announced a range of price cuts on their products.
Handspring last week released its Wireless Internet Access Suite, which includes programs for Web browsing, messaging and e-mail applications. Perhaps the most notable part of Handspring’s announcement is that the new version of its Internet browser, Blazer, will feature content from Microsoft Corp.’s MSN Mobile service. The move is striking because Microsoft offers the Pocket PC platform, the closest competitor to Palm’s operating system.
While Palm still controls the vast majority of the PDA platform market, Microsoft continues to make headway, especially in Europe. And while Handspring is the largest licensee of the Palm OS-and even recently renewed its license-the move could be seen as affront aimed at Palm. And it wouldn’t be unprovoked-in the past few weeks Palm and Handspring have been cutting prices on their PDAs left and right. Palm dropped the price of its Palm VII down to $200 (or $100 with a Palm rebate) and Handspring dropped the price of its Visor Deluxe down $50 to a matching $200. Handspring also is offering a $50 rebate on its Visor Platinum.
Handspring’s Wireless Internet Access Suite is just the latest salvo in the battle, and includes a CD with the browser, Yahoo! Messenger JP Mobile One-Touch Mail and Electric Pocket’s BugMe! Messenger. The service will work over GSM networks, and can support all major wireless Web standards, including WAP and cHTML. The software is shipping with Handspring’s VisorPhone Springboard module for the new price of $250 with a service plan.
