Palm to debut touch-screen smart phone Pre in June

More than a decade ago, Palm Inc gained prominence with its Palm Pilot, a small device that put the power of computing literally in the customer's hands.

The company's stock more than tripled on the initial offering price on the first day of trading nine years ago, but later the technology market collapsed lowering demand and the rise of smart phones pushed its Palm Treo out of the reckoning.

Palm was looking around for a buyer for itself two years ago when last heard of and its stock plumbed to $1.42, down 99.6 per cent form the first-day close.

On 6 June, however, the Sunnyvale, California-based company will show off its new stuff in hopes of regaining its sheen. The company on Tuesday introduced its long-awaited Pre model – a touch-screen smart phone with a sliding keyboard – to help it compete more effectively with popular iPhones and BlackBerrys.

Analysts believe this could be the last opportunity for the company to take its place as a serious contender and if it failed that could mean the end of the road for the company.

Wall Street appears to have liked what it has seen as the company's shares have zoomed 280 per cent this year, though they lost 38 cents to close at $11.68 on Tuesday.

With the Pre, Palm is hoping to take some chunk of the smart phone market from the likes of Apple with their iPhone and iPod Touch which between themselves have chalked up more than 30 million subscribers according to industry analysts.

Palm was once known of its pioneering technology based gadgets and its Pilot which debuted in 1996 had changed the personal device market. Later in 2002, its Treo became a trend setter attracting millions of loyal customers.

But the company slipped up when iPhone, Blackberry and other devices stormed the market. Palm failed to update its operating system quickly enough and lost its competitive edge. Analysts point out that the operating system is what users see when they turn on the device and allows them to surf the internet run other applications on the device.

In the first quarter of 2006, Palm's operating system had a 40 per cent share of all smart phone devices in the US as compared with BlackBerry's 28 per cent according to analysts. However, by the same time this year the company's share had fallen to 10 per cent, BlackBerry's had grown to 36 per cent and Apple had cornered 21 per cent since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

In January, this year Palm launched and operating system called WebOS, for the Pre and other devices.

WebOS comes with some features that set it apart from Apple's operating system. The operating system makes for multi-tasking i.e. it allows the user to switch between applications without closing them which is not possible on the iPhone. It can also connect to several email accounts so that the user need not check mails at multiple places. Also its touch-screen features are similar to iPhone' and also offer a zoom capability with just a brush of a finger.

WebOS also comes with a simple interface that allows website developers to create applications easily for the phone. According to analysts Palm will have to attract developers to build applications to tout its application integrating capacity on a scale comparable with Apple's iPhone.