Palm’s game changing hardware

I’ve been think­ing a lot about some­thing Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan has said a few times now. He said that the new devices based on Nova, the code­name for Palm’s new OS, will fea­ture “game chang­ing hardware.”

This is an inter­est­ing phrase. New devices that rad­i­cally change the direc­tion of their mar­ket don’t come along all that often. In the PDA/​smartphone field, it’s only hap­pened three times in the last 15 years: the orig­i­nal Palm Pilot, the Treo 600 and the iPhone. And of those, Ed Col­li­gan was instru­men­tal in the first two. You could even argue that the Foleo, some­thing he described as rev­o­lu­tion­ary, was the pre­cur­sor to the cur­rent net­book craze. So he knows “game chang­ing hard­ware” when he sees it. If he thinks the new Nova devices are going to rock the indus­try, I’m inclined to believe him.

So what could it be? It won’t be any­thing like the Treo or Cen­tro, bar-​shaped devices with rel­a­tively small screens and front-​facing key­boards. So what else?

A lot of peo­ple have spec­u­lated that the new Nova devices will be slate, all-​screen devices like the iPhone. This isn’t an unrea­son­able guess, given that we know that Nova will be tar­geted at the “pro­sumer” seg­ment of the mar­ket, flashy high per­for­mance devices pur­chased by indi­vid­u­als, dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the cor­po­rate fleet Treos and entry level con­sumer Centros.

But the iPhone is already out there. How can Yet Another Black Slab be game changing?

By chang­ing the size, not the shape.

Big is the new small

What if the new Nova devices are like the ubiq­ui­tous PADDs in Star Trek, hand­held ter­mi­nals that took the place of paper? I think the new Palm Nova line will be a cross­breed of the iPhone and Amazon’s Kin­dle, a cellular-​enabled Linux tablet about the size of a Steno pad.

There’s some cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to back this up. We know, for exam­ple, that one of the rea­sons the Foleo was shelved was that it was run­ning a dif­fer­ent vari­ant of Linux than Nova, and they didn’t want to split their effort. If Nova scales well to a 6 to 7 inch screen slate, it would work sim­i­larly well on a 10 inch clamshell like the Foleo. It also leans up against the new Intel mobile slate that should be announced tomorrow.

Is there a mar­ket for a 7 inch slate, with or with­out a Kindle-​style thumb­board? Could this be the game changer Palm has in mind, some­thing to fit between smart­phones and net­books? We’ll find out early next year.