By Dan Jones
Motorola Inc, America Online Inc and Nokia Oyj all took minority stakes in Palm Computing yesterday, as parent company 3Com Corp filed for an initial public offering intended for early next year. 3Com will offer less than 20% of the Palm shares in its initial offering, and Motorola, AOL and Nokia have taken stakes of around 1.5% each. With an 80% stake, 3Com will remain the majority shareholder and expects to raise about $100m with the IPO.
Motorola says that it will use the PalmOS in a wide variety of wireless devices from smartphones to tablet-style devices. Our current plans are to do wireless versions of the Palm devices, said Janice Webb, senior vice president of Motorola’s personal networks group. She said that Motorola development teams were already developing products and expects the first production devices will arrive on the market in 2001.
That Motorola is taking a stake in Palm has caused some to question the company’s loyalty to Symbian Plc, the company it formed with Nokia, Ericsson, Psion and Matsushita. Industry watchers have often seen Motorola as less committed to the consortium and the EPOC operating system it supports than other members of the group. However, Webb denied this, saying that Motorola would be supporting both EPOC and Palm. She said that the 32-bit EPOC OS is more powerful than the current PalmOS, which is 16-bit. However, she said many favored the PalmOS for its very nice user interface. Motorola isn’t ruling out taking a similar path to Nokia and combining the EPOC kernel with the PalmOS user interface. My view is that there won’t be a standard, Webb said, although she noted that all of the major players are working to make the separate systems interoperable.
Nokia’s stake in Palm is an extension of its existing relationship with the company, and it plans to deliver a combined PDA/Communicator phone based on the OS by 2001. However, the strengthening of ties comes just days after one of Nokia’s major rivals – and partners in Symbian – Ericsson announced that it is working with Microsoft to develop a new mobile platform for smartphones and other devices.
Palm and AOL are already working together as part of the ‘AOL Anywhere’ project, aimed at getting the AOL client on a whole range of mobile devices. A Palm Computing spokesperson said that the two companies would be concentrating on developing wireless instant messaging for the PalmOS.
