Palm Nova - Palm's new operating system
Perhaps Nova is Palm's stagnant company’s last hope to keep up with the outgoing locomotive of the smartphone market, which is dominated by the iPhone and Blackberry. Things are getting worse with Palm. The latest version of Palm OS remains Palm OS 5, which was released six years ago. The appearance of Palm OS 6 was expected three years ago, but this never happened. The Nova software platform is based on the Linux kernel and will be significantly different from all previous versions of Palm OS.
Simultaneously with the OS on January 8, a line of new Palm models based on it will be announced. They will be positioned as a cross between Blackberry (smartphones for work) and iPhone (smartphones for everyday use). Entering the market for all this is planned for mid-2009. At best, in 2009 they will see three or four new Palm models.
Well-known manager John Rubinstein (former Apple senior vice president of hardware development) was invited to run this new project , and the project is financed by a group of investors led by former Apple CFO Fred Anderson . A number of talented engineers who have left Apple work with them. In total, the company hired 150 new developers, most of whom are working on this particular project.