Nokia Corp. and Palm Computing Inc. have entered into a joint development agreement under which the two will cross-license their respective technologies to create a new category of wireless phones featuring Palm’s pen-based user input method and personal information management functions.
“It’s an expansion of the Palm OS to allow the convergence of mobile phones and a Palm-like device,” said Mark Bercow, Palm’s vice president of strategic alliances and product development.
At the same time, the Symbian group announced it and Palm have agreed to discuss a possible cross licensing of their technologies.
There is no agreement yet between Symbian and Palm. The two have only agreed they will discuss the possibility.
“There has been no discussion to date and there is no set schedule for them,” Bercow said, calling reports published immediately after the announcement inaccurate. “It’s a goodwill gesture to the market that we’re willing to contribute.”
However, Nokia is a member of the Symbian group, formed to promote the use of the EPOC operating system by Psion plc, also a Symbian member. Other Symbian members include handset manufacturers Motorola Inc., L.M. Ericsson and Matsushita.
Nokia’s agreement with Palm is intended to marry EPOC with the Palm OS’ user input and personal digital assistant applications. K.P. Wilska, senior vice president, Nokia Americas, insisted Nokia’s role in Symbian has nothing to do with the company’s agreement with Palm.
“We have not been thinking about (Symbian) on this,” he said. “This is about what works best for Nokia. Palm works best with Nokia and Symbian works best for Nokia. Everything else is something else.”
But while both Palm and Nokia insist their agreement has nothing to do with possible discussions Palm may have with Symbian, the result of their efforts could play a significant role in the talks between Symbian and Palm.
According to Bercow, the Palm system can run atop different operating systems. Current Palm OS devices use an OS “kernel” from a third-party system called AMX. The agreement with Nokia will have Nokia substituting the AMX kernel with an EPOC kernel.
Nokia’s Wilska said the idea is to bring more sophisticated PIM functions to wireless phones. He said a phone keypad by itself is too difficult an input method for the user to operate these more sophisticated applications, so a pen-based method was needed.
“It’s all part of the evolution of mobile phones, Wilska said. “First you had a short dialing memory. Then names were added to the numbers. Then there were more numbers. Now phones can store 1,000 names with (several) numbers each.” The most recent evolutionary step is to add applications from the PDA space.
“Palm is the leading PDA platform,” Wilska said. “It is the biggest developer of these applications.” Many applications are needed because users have different needs and no one company can provide them all, he said.
Palm said the technology created as a result of the joint development agreement will be made available to other phone manufactures. It is not exclusive to Nokia.
Together, Palm and Symbian teaming up would eliminate the other as a competitor, allowing them to better focus on their main rival-Microsoft Corp. The Seattle software giant also hopes to capture a large share of the wireless handset market, promoting its Windows CE technology over all others.
“I do think the loser here is Microsoft,” Bercow said. “They continue to struggle in this space.”
