Palm Inc. last week announced a deal with some of the country’s biggest chip makers to design a pre-packaged chip architecture for Palm OS-based personal digital assistants, a move Palm said will speed up the design and development time for the company’s licensees and software developers and ultimately strengthen its operating system business.
The contract involves Texas Instruments Inc., Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc., which have agreed to design a chip architecture that is tailored to support the Palm OS. The architecture will include ARM Holding plc’s microprocessor technology, which will increase the processing power of Palm’s OS.
Specifically, Intel and Motorola will create chip reference designs and TI will develop a wireless processing platform that will be optimized for the Palm OS. ARM will work to make sure the Palm OS moves smoothly to ARM architecture.
Palm officials said the deal simplifies the entire development process for the company’s licensees and software developers because theor electronics companies have already signed on with either Pocket PC or EPOC, leaving few companies to actually take advantage of Palm’s new chip architecture arrangement.
“My feeling, though, is that they’re too late,” Ward-Dutton said of Palm.
The company should have made this move years ago, he said, instead of resting on its laurels while Microsoft built its operating system. The Palm OS still operates on Motorola’s DragonBall microprocessor, which is not as fast as the ARM technology that Microsoft is using now. And even though Palm is moving toward ARM technology, it may be too little too late, Ward-Dutton said.
In addition, Microsoft has the backing of its software business, which adds to the attractiveness of the Pocket PC operating system in a business setting, Ward-Dutton said.
“I think they’re really quite scared now,” he said of Palm.
