PalmTXWord has it that Palm is looking to sell.  Quite frankly, I’m surprised they waited this long.

I was an ardent Palm supporter for many years.  My first unit was a $350 Palm IIIe in 1999.  This bad boy came with a whopping 2 MB memory, a 160×160 monochrome screen that could be backlit on command, and required two AA batteries every 6 days (I was a heavy user).  I loved the machine and saw enormous potential for the mobile computing sector.

At the time I was a customer service rep at a major appliance repair shop, and this device was perfect for storing customer information as they called on the phone.  Gone were the days when I would carry one or more books with me all over the shop in the event the phone rang while I was in the back and someone wanted information on an order.  The Palm could find any of the 4500 customer records I had accumulated each year in the space of 20 seconds!

Great times, indeed.

From this device I went to the IIIxe (two of them), the Sony Clie SJ-33, the M505, the Tungsten-T, and finally the Tungsten-T2.  Aside from the Sony (which ran the PalmOS), I had owned six Palms over the span of seven years.  Aside from the T2, the reason for the turnover was often the same … I broke the device at work thanks in part to gravity.  The T2 was replaced because I had grown weary of Palm’s poor management decisions and opted to buy a PocketPC device.  Two and a half years later, I’m still using the very same HP iPaq 2210 that replaced the Tungsten-T2.

I loved the Palms for the six years that they were in use.  These machines could do everything I ever asked of them, and were perfect for a business setting.  I never tried to use these for recreation, really … but I will admit that I’ve been an avid eReader since 2000.  What really upset me was the direction management was following for their hardware.

WiFi was booming on PocketPC devices.  Dell had their Axims with built-in WiFi-b.  HP had some high-end iPaqs with WiFi-b.  Heck, Sony even offered an add-on for one of their stupidly expensive Clie models (selling for $800 at the time).  But Palm decided with the release of the Tungsten T3 that WiFi was an extravigance that people didn’t want, and that was the end of the subject.

They weren’t listening to what consumers wanted … they were telling consumers what they wanted.

Within days of Palm’s upper management passing their verdict on WiFi, I (and many others) made the switch to other devices.  We didn’t want WiFi to surf the internet on a 320×320 screen resolution.  Lord knows how unsightly that would have been in 2005 before sites started supporting mobile devices better.  We wanted WiFi so that we could sync our devices with our mail servers, and communicate remotely through these powerful machines.  At the time, I was really pushing to write a mobile application that would be used by the warehouse staff at my work.  What better way to find the products and stocks they needed without ever getting off the forklift!  Small and versatile, these little units would have been cheaper than a tablet PC and just as powerful considering the actual requirements of the day.

Unfortunately, Palm didn’t immediately see things that way.  It wasn’t until the fall season that they released an SDIO WiFi card for the T2 and T3, and later integrated WiFi-b into some of their high-end devices.  But by then it was too late.

This was also during the time when Palm split their organization in two divisions.  One for their hardware, the other for software.  This was really just the beginning of the end.  Now, after two years, the company is re-conglomerated and looking for options.  One option is to sell.  Nokia and Motorola are salivating at this prospect.

It’s really unfortunate that things turned out this way.  At the start of the century, Palm was poised to take the world by storm.  Instead, they let Microsoft and RIM pass by without a fight.  With nowhere else left to go, they seek to merge and eventually fade into history.  No matter how much I think about it, I can only think “it didn’t have to end this way.”