Posted by : trraju on Sep 18, 2005 - 02:49 AM General

The original Palm Pilot was the iPod of its time: a must-have pocket-size gadget that defined techno-chic in the mid-1990s. The Palm conferred more than membership in club digerati. It connoted professional success, signaling that you're one person who is simply too busy to keep all those appointments and contacts in your head and way too hip to write them on dead trees. And so it was a bit sad when PalmSource, the Sunnyvale company that makes the Palm software, announced last Friday that it was selling itself off to a Japanese outfit for a relatively paltry $324.3 million. Just to compare Apple to operating systems, Steve Jobs' company sold $1.1 billion worth of iPods in just three months earlier this year. The fire-sale of PalmSource left us wondering: Where did all the Zen go?
The answer to the flat-lining of the personal digital assistant lies in an ill-kept secret: Not everyone is geek like us. Not everyone records appointments on their computer's desktop, instead of in a DayTimer planner or a calendar hung on the refrigerator. Not everyone needs -- or wants -- their business contacts with them at all times.

And not everyone is willing to invest the time, and $250, to be organized.

In fact, Forrester Research is only too happy to quantify just how oddball we are: 15.5 million U.S. households say they use a PDA, out of 108 million.

This insight is blindingly obvious to the folks at Palm, the separate company that makes various Palm devices. One of its hottest products these days is the Treo, a handheld smart-phone that marries the organizer with a cell phone -- and throws in e-mail and Web access for good measure.

And its new LifeDrive mobile manager carries just about anything you can store in 1s and 0s -- from PowerPoint presentations to vacation photos.

The Palm is a lesson in the kind of techno-myopia that occasionally blinds the valley. For us, life revolves around the keyboard. So we assume it must be so for everyone else.

We're surprised -- indeed, shocked, shocked -- when others don't share the same tingle of accomplishment from beaming their business cards wirelessly to a new acquaintance.

Certainly, other factors undercut the original Palm, including the departure of its three founders -- one of whom, Ed Colligan, has since returned as president and CEO. Also, Palm was late to the game when it came to adding features such as MP3 players or games.

Nonetheless, the Palm is a lesson in the perilously short half-life of the "it" gadget. One day, everyone's brushing up on their Palm Graffiti, the next they're all thumbs, typing out a message on their BlackBerry's Chiclet-size keys.

It's easy to forget that sales of PDAs once grew at a whopping 169 percent a year, and the Palm operating system ran on 77 percent of all handheld PDAs sold.

Are you listening, Apple?

PalmSource may get a new lease on life as it takes its tap-and-go software to mobile phones. After all, the Palm set the long-emulated standard for making simple, powerful mobile applications.

That strategy -- and perhaps a pair of white earbuds -- could just allow PalmSource to recapture its lost Zen.

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