Before the days of smartphones, Palm owned the Personal Digital Assistant market to the extent that Palm Pilot was the term most people used to refer to a PDA, regardless of the manufacturer. Once cell phones and PDAs merged to become smartphones, Palm’s position diminished compared to the likes of BlackBerry and the Apple iPhone.

Now Palm is poised to release its new OS, code named Nova, at the January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Palm is very tight-lipped about the features to be expected with the Nova OS, but the overwhelming message that has been getting through is that its aim is to bridge the gap between iPhone and BlackBerry. There seems to be no intention to go head-to-head with iPhone or BlackBerry.

Palm is also expected to release new handheld devices in 2009 that will use the Nova OS. Today, the firm’s lower end Centro devices operate on the Palm OS which has had very little updating over the past couple of years. The high-end, more business oriented Treo uses the Windows Mobile OS.

While welcoming the competition and hoping for exciting innovations, we have to recognize that Palm’s gamble is a big one. Aiming for the gap between the iPhone and BlackBerries may have been a pretty big target a year ago but now the gap has been packed rather tightly by the iPhone which has greatly enhanced its viability as a business device and BlackBerry which has made enormous strides to provide the entertainment and personal features that consumers demand. The gap is further crowded by newer devices such as the Google Android OS based T-Mobile G1 and Windows Mobile devices like the Samsung Omnia.

Technorati Tags: New Palm Nova Operating System, IPhone, Computer, Software
Del.Icio.Us Tags: New Palm Nova Operating System, IPhone, Computer, Software