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To: KyrosL who wrote (35517)	10/14/1999 9:39:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

"Palm & Nokia Team To Build Wireless Handheld Devices" (with a bit of new info) By Jeremy Scott-Joynt 14 October 1999 Palm Computing has worked its way into a seat at the wireless top table. Thanks to a deal with Nokia, the handheld computing company recently spun off from 3Com - and awaiting a probable IPO - Palm now has access to Symbian, the smartphone technology backed by the three largest mobile phone makers in the world. In the process, Palm has stolen a march on Microsoft just 24 hours after the software behemoth announced its determination to carve its own swathe through the wireless world. Palm's deal means that Nokia and Palm will collaborate in building handheld data devices that can be scribbled on, rather than typed into. Palm will contribute its operating system, already used in well over half the handheld PDAs in circulation. Nokia will lend wireless expertise to the partnership, with new products due in the marketplace within 18 months. But how that is to be accomplished is not yet clear. According to Nokia Mobile Phone's senior vice president Anssi Vanjoki, the idea is to have the EPOC 32 kernel - the heart of the Symbian devices, created by Symbian founding partner Psion - with the Palm operating system and user interface sitting on top. That way, in theory, both Palm applications and EPOC ones can run side by side. The news is a good deal for almost everyone. Palm manages to gain access to Symbian technologies - which it has agreed to license - while staying out of Symbian itself. As Alan Kessler, Palm's president, put it, "It's not necessary to finalise the [relationship] with Symbian. We've no intention to do so at the moment." This is important for Palm, because the company has other wireless deals extant with, for instance, Qualcomm, which has licensed the Palm OS for devices in use in the US. It should be noted, though, that the Nokia-Palm deal explicitly aims for product rollout with US wireless technologies first - even if Vanjoki was at pains to stress that Europe would follow closely behind. Palm has been able to keep its independence from Symbian: vital for its prospective IPO. As one of Symbian's directors pointed out, Kessler had to stress this. 'In any case, it doesn't really matter (about joining or not joining),' he said. 'We all need each other's technologies. We're all interdependent.' In equity terms, Palm is still on its own two feet, too. Kessler added that shared equity was no part of the deal. 'It hasn't been envisioned in the past, it's not being discussed now, and it's not being envisioned in the future,' he said. For Symbian, the pen-based interface was a glaring hole in what the alliance created by Ericsson, Nokia, Psion and Motorola could offer. Even if Palm has not bought in entirely, the indirect relationship is still a healthy one. For Nokia, of course, there's little downside. Its Communicator product is good, but limited by small size, and Palm's expertise will give it an edge. There's only one loser - and that's Microsoft. The deal strikes at the heart of what Bill Gates told a Telecom 99 audience at the beginning of this week: the need for the company to push hard into wireless. Microsoft's attempts to get its stripped-down Windows CE operating system to compete with Palm and with EPOC have not met with conspicuous success. Working with wireless carriers - and perhaps taking equity stakes in them - may still assist Microsoft, but for the moment Palm has taken the cake. Not only has it jumped into bed with the three biggest wireless vendors in the world, but as one very excited analyst put it, "it has kept its virginity intact." Meanwhile, rumors at Telecom 99 have hinted that Gates' speech was intended to presage a major wireless deal, to be announced this week. The unidentified prospective partner has apparently now applied the brakes. totaltele.com Mang