Windows in a Palm

A few years ago, it would have seemed unlikely, at best, to see a Palm handheld device running on the mobile operating system from its rival, Microsoft, but here we have it. At a news conference Monday morning in San Francisco, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Palm Inc. CEO Ed Colligan announced a Treo smart phone based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile software. The deal had been widely rumored and reported in advance. (See this story from Saturday's newspaper.) Here's the news release with links to the webcast of today's news conference.

As unimaginable as it once was, this particular development became possible after Palm was split into two companies, one focusing on hardware and the other on software. As noted here back in May 2004, Microsoft's top mobile devices exec, Pieter Knook, acknowledged then that the break-up of Palm made it "perfectly feasible" for the hardware company, then known as palmOne, to use Windows Mobile. "They would be an interesting partner for us," he said.