What happened to Palm?

Back in the hey days of 2001 I was fascinated to use my Palm iiic and Nokia phone to download email, it worked in a clunky sort of way but it was now 7 years ago a smart phone and pda combination of sorts.

Looking at the latest corporate smartphone figures one can see that after the 70% + market share of RIM comes Apple with iphone 14% and third with now 11% is Palm. With the software and development backing they had earlier in the decade it makes good MBA reading on how they lost their lead and how their transition from PDA to phone took them so long.. What is more they ditched their own netbook the Folio before the first net books had arrived nearly two years ago.

So much of Palm history seems to say before its time and now I would be fascinated to see the figures of simple PDA's as they must be shockingly down. Looking at their product line there 7 models with various functions and system softwares. Why they pulled in Windows mobile to their phones I will never know after so much time and trouble spent developing the Palm OS and community.

When John Rubenstein joined from Apple a few back with his experience on the iPod and original iMac projects I thought some magic product dust may be sprinkled over the company.

But with no touch screen phone to date you wonder what's going on here is a quote from CEO Ed Colligan this Autumn:

"While we're still in the midst of our transformation and have challenges ahead, we are bringing outstanding new products to market, hiring world-class talent and preparing to launch a new platform that will usher in a new era at Palm."

Now that we have the iPhone and Blackberry Storm, what is the next state of the art Palm going to look like and does anyone really care ?