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Where's the Palm Treo Mobile Manager? and where's Cobalt, come to that?

PalmOne wants its share of the iPod market. The iPod market needs phone functionality - so it's a short step from there to predicting that the "Mobile Manager" - codename for the new Palm hand-held range - will be followed by a Treo variant.

What we still don't know, is whether the new "category" of hand-helds will use the current, obsolete "Garnet" operating system from PalmSoft, or the new multi-threaded "Cobalt" version of PalmOs.

At this stage, it seems (from some super-sleuth work by readers of Engadget) that the first device will be launched in a week - May 18th - and PalmOne has now started acknowledging the rumours, which started with an accidental (?) leak on Amazon.com.

"A growing number of people today want access to greater volumes of digital business, personal, entertainment and online content," says the press release http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/2205 from yesterday. This content, says PalmOne "is as mobile as they are -- and just as varied. To meet this need, palmOne signals the creation of a new category of mobile-computing products -- the mobile manager."

The most obvious new feature of Mobile Manager range is the hard disk - the LifeDrive - apparently a four gig hard drive. The idea seems to be that this Palm will be used more for videos than for music, and preliminary pictures show it being used in landscape mode.

How did news of this Palm sneak out? Apparently, someone found it offered in "pre-sales mode" on Amazon. It didn't have a price - but this enterprising spy added it to the basket anyway - and the total price rose by $499.88.

The only thing it isn't, it seems, is a phone. The success of the Treo range has been a strong contrast to the ordinary PDA range so far, and no doubt, a Treo xxx is on the way - but until PalmOne sorts out its reliability problems with the Treo 650 well enough that Orange feels confident to launch it later this summer, they won't want to talk about a new model.

But potentially, it could work with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It has Bluetooth, it has WiFi -  so the next question is "when does Skype support it?" ...maybe we'll learn more about its potential at VON Europe in Stockholm in two weeks' time.

Engadget coverage: here