Judging by the battle sounds, Donna Dubinsky was not at all pleased with the deal. On the other hand, the new Palm management has made a lot to gain their reputation as quite adequate people and good partners (By the way, Handspring is merging with the purely hardware Platform Solutions division, without any relation to PalmSource, which is to be independent soon).

Jeff Hawkins himself said that the situation has none of the reunion about itself. There’s no nostalgia. Too many things have changed in products and in people. And it seems like there is no place left for Donna in the united company. At least, if Hawkins becomes the CTO of the new company, Colligan heads the wireless solutions division (Smartphone Solutions), she will only sit in the Palm directors board, without any position. Todd Bradley will remain Palm’s CEO, that’s certain.

Currently, Palm is doing not bad at all. It has enough licensees, some of which are big sharks like Sony or Samsung. In a long term, Samsung may quickly grow in the communicators market to the same level as Sony in the PDA market. Palm offers a wide range of models: the Zire is a real sales hit, while the new Tungsten is a worthy competitor to Pocket PC models in terms of capabilities, at least.

Moreover, they have already announced the Tungsten C with integrated Wi-Fi, a 400MHz XScale processor, 64MB of RAM and an integrated keyboard as well as the Treo 600 (whatever name it will have). The new Treo is smaller than previous models, but features an built-in camera and talk time prolonged to 6 hours. PalmOS 6 is also looming in the horizon, which is mostly focused on wireless capabilities, security and such things.

But the main thing Palm has today is the people. It is a kind of “Dream Team” – the best team in the history of the company. It unites the founding fathers, whose creative potential and experience is hard to question, and the new folk who had dragged Palm out of the abyss. We even get the impression that that Bradley, Hawkins, Nagel and Colligan can finally stop defending their positions and attack the Microsoft soon.