…So, Nagel, ex-senior vice-president in Apple, responsible for R&D, and particularly for Copland OS, AT&T’s chief technology officer, and president of AT&T Labs (the doctor degree in psychology is also not quite irrelevant here) suited well for his role. Once again, about Apple in Palm. Whom do you think Nagel took as a CTO? Of course, the ex-head of the Newton project, Be’s chief operating officer, Steve Sakoman. Quite a mafia family, isn’t it? As for the second division, Solutions Group, which would be producing and selling PDAs, the ex vice-president of Gateway, Todd Bradley, was appointed to head it.

The second opportunity for Palm and for other PDA makers to live on was by expanding the wireless capabilities of these devices. This was clear long before: I could name Palm VII and VisorPhone. But it is really true that wireless communication is more than natural for PDAs. Work in this direction was underway (Handspring even hired the ex-head of the FCC, William Kennard). That summer the first results of this hard work appeared.

The FCC allowed both Handspring and Palm to produce devices capable of operating in the mobile frequency range. Both companies announced their plans (known long before, actually) and Handspring went about by handing a VideoPhone freely to any Visor buyer that would subscribe for any tariff plan at the company website. Moreover, the company promised to roll out new devices with integrated wireless communication before the end of the year. Palm, in fact, also promised the same thing, although unofficially.

It was clear for anyone that this was the future. Donna was quite right in saying that the future of personal computing was also the future of personal communication. But let’s get back to the topic. So, there was summer, the dead season, and the world PDA sales were close to naught, dropping by 21% in just one quarter. The Pocket PC platform was also pushing up (for example, Compaq shipped about half a million iPaqs in the second quarter). So, it was no wonder Palm was losing its finances at the same ratio.

It was rumored on every corner that Palm was going to be sold. There were a number of bidders named, most logical one of the whole bunch seemed to be Sony. The companies were still pulling in their belts. Handspring and Palm both announced more staff layoffs (Palm – about 16% and Handspring – 9%). Palm even gave up the idea of building new headquarters and sold the land. Of course, they both were struggling to squeeze into the corporate market, which seemed like a calm lagoon in the middle of a storming see. However, even though both: Palm and Handspring had a few nice deals in this sector, the fall was the time of Pocket PC 2002, the new operating system, initially targeted at this corporate market.