Squeezing Palms – Microsoft and Symbian apply the pressure...

Palm has always been a company silicon.com has had time for. It has innovated and shown a maturity in design and product reliability others would do well to learn from. But it’s in a rut and has been for some time.

The market for handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, has never really exploded. Their sales volumes since the form factor was really invented (and we’re not going back to Apple Newtons and others before the work at a then 3Com division) have been miniscule compared to those of PCs and mobile phones. Draw a bar chart and PDAs would look like little Trinity Church on Wall Street sandwiched between two skyscrapers.

And it is from the PC and mobile phone worlds that Palm’s challengers have come. Today saw Microsoft release the latest version of its Pocket PC software. Not only are a long line of manufacturers on board but companies are experimenting with stylus-free, keyboard-based communications devices based on Pocket PC.

At the same time, many enterprise IT departments, familiar with Microsoft software such as desktop OSes and Exchange messaging servers, are increasingly happy integrating Pocket PC devices as part of official policies.

So Palm is feeling the pressure on that front.

Meanwhile there has always been the prospect of communications device makers such as Handspring, Kyocera, Samsung and maybe even Nokia expanding the Palm universe by making Palm OS-based handsets. True, Palm does have a ragtag bunch of manufacturers in its stable but smart devices based on the Symbian OS are going to dominate this space.

Symbian got off to a bit of a slow start after a big fanfare surrounding its founding but now it’s ramping up, in some fine products from the likes of Nokia, Siemens and SonyEricsson.

Microsoft’s big mobile rebranding today does also include its Windows Smartphone OS but make no mistake, Pocket PC and related software will mean more for its bottom line, albeit indirectly in most cases.

In this context, with Microsoft to one side and Symbian to the other, it’s hard not to think Palm will be further squeezed. And not even the acquisition of Handspring will do much to stop that.