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A Treo, with a "Start" menu? But ... that's a Microsoft feature, not Palm!

Palm, Microsoft. Deadly rivals. Two houses with an ancient grudge. And surely, there can be no star-crossed lovers?

Apparently, yes. A PalmOne Romeo, called Treo, has fallen for the Juliet of Magneto, not Montagu.

Magneto, in case you missed the announcement back in March, is the next version of Windows Mobile, due to ship to developers this month in "bits and pieces" form and expected to be ready to ship by April.

What's in a name? Oh, Treo, Treo, wherefore art thou Palm?

Well, Treo isn't. PalmSource is Palm, but PalmOne is now a separate outfit, and is perfectly capable of building a 400 MHz box like the Tungsten T5 - a beast with the grunt to run Magneto.

The hordes are returning from the San Francisco CTIA conference on mobile and wireless - and the gossip which they shared appears to include some thunderbolts, of which the Magneto-PalmOne affair is easily the scariest. "It's not unthinkable" was as far as our Sniffer could get the PalmOne executives to go.

But "not unthinkable" is going to be sheer, stark heresy for fans of the Palm and before Ed Colligan's outfit can persuade the market to allow this, it will have to be very happy that it doesn't damage the overall credibility of the PalmSource platform.

Then again, PalmOne is still dithering about whether it is going to adopt the next PalmSource version, Cobalt (V6.0) instead of Garnet (V5) and the next Treo certainly won't have moved up. But the hardware will.

Our Sniffer reports that Magneto won't be ready by April anyway. "That's optimism from Redmond," said our source. "Most people will plan to start Magneto shipments in about nine months, ramping up for the year-end spend in October 05."

And will Treo be ready for Magneto? "The hardware won't be a problem," is all we could get.