Palm tries to shake off gadget tag

Some 60 per cent of Palm owners use the devices for business purposes, but are failing to realise that its capabilities extend beyond that of an organiser, according to Palm.

Some 60 per cent of Palm owners use the devices for business purposes, but are failing to realise that its capabilities extend beyond that of an organiser, according to Palm.

Although the device is being adopted in the corporate arena, the company is still struggling to convince many users that it is a powerful computing device, admitted Bill Mackay, country manager for Palm UK and Ireland.

Palm sees its product becoming an integral part of people's lives, but said that the devices currently enter the business environment through the back door - bought by the individual and paid for by the company.

"The IT manager is going to standardise on a platform and device. Just like a company car, from Monday to Friday it will be a business device, and at the weekend, it will be your device," said Mackay.

Palm has not been affected by the slowdown in the industry's appetite for hardware, according to Mackay. "The slowdown in the PC market has absolutely everything to do with the fact that there is nothing new out there," he said.

The latest version of the Palm handheld, OS 4, has support for the Bluetooth short-range wireless-networking protocol, and Mackay did not rule out the possibility of PalmOS appearing in a range of embedded devices in the future.

He added that Palm has no plans to switch to a faster processor, insisting that the current 20Mhz chip was sufficient for today's needs.

First published in Computing