Gossip

Palm snubs Palmsource. Well, maybe not, but ...

If I were PalmSource, I'd probably kill my ex-colleagues at PalmOne. A week after PalmSource was showing its new Cobalt 6.1 OS at developers in Munich, without any hardware to demo it, PalmOne comes out with the product: the Tungsten T5 - and will, shortly follow that with the phone version, the Treo 650. What was the marketing department on?

It turns out we were wrong about T5, all of us who thought it was a Cobalt machine.

So if you want to know why the new Palm wasn't on view in Munich last week, you won't find out by asking anybody in PalmOne.

When asked why they didn't announce the Tungsten T5 during the PalmSource developer thrash, a brisk young marcomms graduate informed us grandly that "if you look back into Palm's history, they typically do not make announcements at trade shows. Not for many years."

Dandy. Utter tosh, but dandy tosh. Of course, PalmOne can make its announcement at the venue of its choosing ... but why not a little synergy? A big announcement in New York, or Las Vegas or wherever ... and a live video feed to the PalmSource devcon. How hard is that? Nobody's asking the whole of PalmOne to make the journey to Munich just for the chance to appear before a dozen trade and tech hacks in a suburban Hilton. Oh, and a couple hundred developers, of course ...

Indeed the sense of "left hand and right hand belong to different hosts" goes further. Never mind the fact that (obviously) they won't talk about the (Cobalt based) Treo 650, because it isn't announced yet. Just try taking their advice and getting "more information" about the Tungsten T5

You'll be directed to a page which asks you which part of the world you live in. Click Europe: "you are not authorised to access this page." The same link, if you pretend to be American, tells you all about it. So obviously, you mustn't read this if you are outside North America. Right?

Oh, well. It turns out the T5 isn't Cobalt 6.1 or even Cobalt 6.0. It's Garnet or Moonstone or whatever gem Palm OS® 5.4 is this week.

Disappointed? Well, yes, a bit.