Palm Struggles To Maintain Its LeadPalm Struggles To Maintain Its Lead

Palm Inc. isn't sitting still in the face of competition from Linux PDA vendors. By the beginning of next summer, Palm will be rolling out a much more powerful platform based on a CPU by ARM Holdings Ltd., and running the new Palm OS 5.0. The platform will have much-improved multitasking and number-crunching capabilities that will allow it to handle low-level security tasks such as encryption and high-bandwidth communications.

"One of the things we want to make sure will work is communications over a cell network, Bluetooth transactions, and application processing--all at the same time," says Palm's chief competitive officer Michael Mace. Palm will also include unspecified Java extensions that will improve Java application performance and portability. The platform will also include a software emulation of the Motorola Dragonball processor, the current Palm platform standard, so that existing Palm applications will still run in an emulation mode.

It's no accident that Palm has chosen a CPU designed by ARM. With an estimated 75% of the handheld market, ARM processors have proven performance and a mature development community. ARM is also used in some Windows CE PDAs, such as the Compaq iPAQ, and the majority of new Linux PDAs will use ARM processors.

While it is still too early to call, some pundits suggest that the industry is converging on the ARM processor as the standard hardware platform for PDAs, much the same way that the desktop PC vendors have embraced Intel's x86 architecture.

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