Interview: Palm plans a haven for data

The next version of the Palm operating system will provide increased security, says PalmSource president David Nagel

IT Week: In June, Palm [now PalmOne] said it would acquire Handspring and spin off its operating system subsidiary PalmSource. As PalmSource's chief executive, can you say how that process is going?

David Nagel: We expect [the acquisition] to go through in late-October to mid-November. Certainly, the next major focus is to develop Sahara [codename for the next platform version, Palm OS 6]. It's a fairly massive release and it's much more secure. In the handheld market, devices have to be much more secure than PCs because they are mobile. We think we can do much better crypto engines than with OS 5. In OS 6 we extend it to signed code and signed applications so that if you change just one bit of a program it will not run. OS 6 also handles multitasking and multithreading in much larger quantities.

The release of the original Palm - the Palm Pilot - was a watershed in handheld computing. Will wireless create a new wave?

I don't know whether it will fundamentally change the market. The first device was kind of an overheating. It became the hip product of the era and kind of exemplified the bubble. [Countries in Europe have] been ahead in wireless for years, in mobile phone adoption and in things like SMS gateways. We're just getting them in the US. It's quite bizarre. But 802.11 [wireless LAN technology] is growing like a weed.

Now that RIM is licensing its software, will Palm and some of the other platforms be able to adopt more BlackBerry-like features for email on the go?

BlackBerry [devices are] drawing competition. They're the gold standard in mobile email but there's room for others. It's interesting how they think of themselves as hardware, software or something else. To me, the analogy is Qualcomm - when it got out of the handset business its stock went up. I think software is RIM's core competency. If you look at what's sticky, it's the infrastructure business, the servers that get installed in the enterprise. I rarely meet anybody who doesn't like the mail [on the BlackBerry] but the rest is lousy.

There seems to be a move away from the idea of all-in-one devices...

People have a limit to the number of pockets they have. For that reason, multi-function devices will not disappear. But the greatest customer satisfaction will come from devices that are much more focused, such as combination game/MP3 players, not a Swiss Army Knife approach.

How do you view your company's products against those of its competitors?

We should consider ourselves to be in the communicator market. A phone must have an open operating system in it and there are three [main] contenders [PalmSource, Symbian and Microsoft]. With Linux it's four and Java it's five. And you could add [Qualcomm's] Brew. There are probably a few too many platforms - the rare commodity is developers. Symbian is becoming very tightly integrated with Nokia. The battle lines have been fairly well drawn.

ABOUT DAVID NAGEL

David Nagel is president and chief executive of PalmSource, the operating system subsidiary that is being spun off from PalmOne.

Previously, Nagel was on Palm's board and before that served as AT&T's chief technology officer.