PalmSource CEO: "Linux is the future"

[Colin Dunstan]

IDG News Service interviewed PalmSource CEO David Nagel, where he talks about PalmSource's acquitision of China MobileSoft, the Chinese market for mobile devices in general, the role of Linux as an operation system for mobile devices, and his personal opinion on the future of the PDA:

It's not dead. We still see 3 to 4 million of these devices being sold with our operating system. What we're finding, though, is that the market is evolving. There are people, like my wife, who still use a PDA. Although she has a smart phone, she just recently bought a new PDA because she does digital photography and uses it as a photo album. Some people will want a combined device, others will want two. The market will sort this out.

[Laurens]

The Register has an interesting opinion piece:

However the omens aren't good for Cobalt, the ground-up rewrite of PalmOS which offers sophisticated multimedia features and multi-tasking. Palm acquired the team who wrote BeOS in August 2001, and the OS crept out to manufacturers just over a year ago. We're still waiting for the first Cobalt phone. Cobalt itself will continue insists Chu, although as a flavor of Linux.

"Linux will be the underlying kernel," he said. "We'll strip the pieces above the kernel and put Cobalt pieces there. It will no longer be the Cobalt kernel".

So why even go to Cobalt, now that it has the whiff of death about it - and no shipping products?

"Manufacturers can go to Cobalt now and 12 to 18 months out, maybe they can go to Linux."

It doesn't sound like the most compelling sales pitch we've ever heard.