Will Palm be three times as lucky?

With all the recent news about job cuts--including from previously unassailable companies the likes of Sony, I thought it will be interesting to highlight that at least one corporation is hiring. BlackBerry smartphone maker RIM is looking for up to 1,250 new employees at the moment, with most, if not all of these new positions for engineers of various disciplines. 

On the other end of the mobile landscape, we have Palm working frantically as it prepares for the unveiling of its Nova operating system at CES in January. Once a giant who dominated the entire field, embattled Palm could be facing a make or break moment in Las Vegas just next month.

Some of you new to the MobileIT scene might not be aware, but Palm single-handedly popularized the concept of a personal digital assistant, or PDA. In fact, the term "Pocket PC" used to denote the earlier generations of Microsoft's PDA is the result of a legal confrontation between Palm and Microsoft over the latter's bid to refer to its product as a "palmtop."

In fact, the idea behind "To do," "Notes," "Calendar" and "Contacts" could be found in my first PDA, a monochrome Palm Pilot Professional with a puny 1MB of battery-backed memory. Not content, Palm also went on to create the Treo Smartphone, at a time when most thought the idea of combining a PDA with a mobile phone was downright strange.

I think it will be interesting indeed to see what CES 2009 will bring. - Paul