Sorry, but no, they haven't got their groove back. Their new product is using Windows Mobile, which, if anything, is at the bottom of all mobile operating systems.

It's time to say goodbye to Palm, once an innovator, but now an empty hulk of a company.

I've been on the Palm platform since 1999 and so I'm very used to it. My workflow requires me to sync a Mac with Entourage to some smartphone that has Notes. The iPhone doesn't have notes and until it does, I'm on Palm. I've had the 680 for about a year and it meets my needs perfectly.

Sure, I'd love a fancy iPhone. But seriously...NOTES!!! Entourage lets me store a buttload of info about all topics within notes, and if I can't sync that with my phone I'm SOL. That's why I stick with Palm.

(Apple: I've got 1 more year on my service agreement with AT&T before I'll be looking for a new phone. Sort out the notes in that time and you've got a customer for life.)

Not a windoze system! No, no, no!

I'm still using my Treo 650, and it is falling apart from sheer hard wear. But I want wifi on my next phone, so...

Wifi on the PalmOS can't be that impossible, can it?

When the original Palm shipped in the late 90s it was revolutionary, but after a series of ownership and management changes they failed to evolve. The new management at Palm was very much like the non-technical Pepsi management at Apple: the new models were incremental versions of the last model, a little more memory, a little smaller, but nothing too risky or radical. The result is they stagnated, and ended up with products not that different from what they started with, a cautionary tale of what happens when risk adverse "professional" managers run a company.

Think about where apple would be without Steve Jobs coming back, and his insistence on taking huge risks-- they'd be in the same condition as Palm, barely alive, with a miniscule user base. To survive a company must take risks and evolve with the times, and I hope the tale of Palm makes it into the business school case studies, so at least someone learns from this fiasco. Its one thing for a company to take a bold risk, try to change the world or at least their market, and ultimately fail, and quite another for a company to practically invent a new market, be sold, and then be slowly mismanaged into the ground.