NEW PALM - And great news for OM

[Lally Singh]

Ok, if you haven't seen Palm's new release yet, it's going to be a
wonderfully pleasant surprise out of the old group:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/08/ces-2009-palm-press-conference/

What this means: assuming palm doesn't screw this up, and I suspect they won't:

- We now have 3 top-tier consumer phone platforms: iPhone, Andriod, Palm.
- All 3 are Unix based.
- the last two are linux based.

Which already means we're going to see more good things end up in the
linux kernel stack from these vendors.  Less work for the OM
community, as more people are interested now.

But, it also means that the mobile device market is:
- Heating up.  More products, press, and interest
- Growing.  We're not going down the same route as the iPod.  There
isn't a clear market winner, which means it'll grow out
heterogeneously into a large, diverse market.

Those two mean that OM's going to have some incoming interest just by
the other products driving in more customers into the marketplace.

Oh, and did I mention that OM's the only one of the four that's
C/Posix programmable?  iPhone: Obj-C, Android: Java, Palm:
HTML/AJAX/Javascript.

-- 
H. Lally Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Virginia Tech