by Christopher Lindquist

Meta Group: Tough Times Ahead for Smart-Phone Maker Palm

News
Mar 01, 20021 min
MobileSmall and Medium Business

A recent analysis by Meta Group states that Palm faces the prospects of a continued decline in the enterprise PDA market for the next several years.

Meta Group says that Palm has been hurt by delays in shipping the more advanced version of its operating system, which was due originally in 2001 but has now slipped to at least the end of 2002 and possibly into 2003. The new OS (Palm OS 5.0) will be the first to support more powerful Intel StrongArm processors, allowing Palm PDAs to run more sophisticated applications, including multimedia. Microsoft’s Pocket PC 2002 already supports StrongArm processors.

The analysis indicates that Palm has been distracted by its ongoing lawsuit with Xerox over patents for handwriting recognition. Palm lost the first round of its court fight, but the company has vowed to appeal the decision.

Meta also states that while Palm did see an increase in sales after Thanksgiving 2001, those results were boosted by sales of older, heavily discounted models, not the more profitable and powerful high-end PDAs.