Palm to announce Nova at CES

According to a report from BusinessWeek, Palm will announce the long awaited replacement for their ageing OS at CES next month. According to the article Palm is due to unveil the long-awaited operating system, code-named Nova, as well as the first of a family of products that will run on it. While Palm has protected its plans with Apple-like secrecy, Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple’s iPhone, oriented to fun.

“People’s work and personal lives are melding,” Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the “fat middle of the market.”

Executives won’t be specific about Nova, though Palm is not looking to go toe-to-toe with the iPhone or BlackBerry. The general idea is to create a platform that’s flexible enough to support a wide range of customer desires. No single product can satisfy all the unmet needs of today’s digital consumers, McNamee says. Today, people carry iPods, cell phones, and Amazon.com Kindle e-book readers. But there’s no mobile-phone software that can handle complex games like those played on a Nintendo DS handheld, or let a working parent manage both corporate e-mail and family calendars.

Sources say Rubinstein’s team also hopes to create phones that make smarter use of data about you. For example, your smartphone could send you an e-mail the day before your next business trip, advising you on the weather conditions in your destination city.

via BusinessWeek