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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (18110)	1/10/2001 12:28:10 PM
From: lkj	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Hi Aus, Don't know the exact reason why Palm didn't support FAT. Sure, Palm could add a DSP chip to the Palm devices to do multimedia applications, but it seems unlikely for Palm to take that route, because the additional chip adds space, power consumption, cost, makes it hard for 3rd party to develop applications, and it creates hardware dependent applications. Let's assume that 4.0 comes out in April and 5.0 comes out in October. Does it make enough sense for Palm to add a DSP chip in there for a 6 months duration? I would like to say no, and based on all the direction that Mace has been laying out for Palm, it just appears that Palm's focus is still on non-multimedia applications at this point. 4.0 can address a lot of markets without multimedia such as education, locational, sales automation, and many many more. In Mace's point of view, these are more compelling applications, and will offer more sales dollar in the time frames. At the same time, the changes to the OS/hardware would be minimal. And I agree with him 100%. On the other hand, Mace could just be saying all this, because catching up to CE and EPOC will take a lot longer than 6 months or 1 year. 5.0 is the major revamp that will bring the Palm OS to the same level as its competition. So that will be the time for Palm to march into multimedia markets that spans across video, audio, streaming, and games, which means lots of storage requirement. Just like Eli said, there will be a lot of demand for SD. Regards, Khan