Palm's super Nova heralds funnest work phones ever

Mention Palm to most smartphone users and their eyes mist over in a reverie of tech nostalgia filled with Palm Pilots and stylus scrawled Graffiti. Sadly, despite aborted attempts at a new breakthrough product, Palm has largely been restricted to churning out Windows Mobile handsets with moderate success (see Palm Treo Pro and Palm Treo 500), rather than pushing the boundaries with its own OS as it once did.

Now, though, that could be about to change. Last week Palm sent out invites to come see its "new-ness" at next month's CES. Looks like that new-ness, is its new and long-awaited OS, codenamed "Nova". Click through for more.

According to Business Week, Nova will launch alongside a "family" of new Palm devices. Normally we'd treat that with the usual pinch of salt any Palm "comeback" deserves (remember the Foleo?) but just over a year ago, Palm pinched one of the men behind Apple's revival, Jon Rubinstein, who's hoping to do the same again for another tech firm with a pioneer past.

According to Palm's Chief Executive Officer, Ed Colligan, the result is a new focus for Palm. "People's work and personal lives are melding," he told Business Week, pointing to what he called, "the fat middle of the market", that lies somewhere between the "fun" iPhone and "serious" BlackBerry - and is hopefully Palm shaped.

Talking about the new OS, another Apple staffer that's moved over to Palm, software engineer Mike Bell, said: "I'm fundamentally convinced we're onto something huge. Some of the stuff we're working on here is mind-blowing—better than anything I've seen before." Assuming he's seen some pretty cool stuff over at Apple, we'd say that was a promising comment.

Still, Palm has disappointed in the past and there have been several false dawns. For now, we'll be looking forward to Palm's CES showing more with hope than expectation.

[ Business Week]