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Over at the always influential Motley Fool, Tim Beyers agrees with all the rest of tech blogdom that the debut of Nova at CES is do or die time for Palm. Also like much of tech blogdom he seems to be really pulling for Palm to reinvent himself (as I am) and considers two major weapons Palm could use to do the unexpected.

The first rabbit that Palm could pull out of a hat that Beyers notes is Handwriting Recognition, writing as follows:

Handwriting recognition has vexed the industry for years. Only a few have made it work well enough to win customers. Apple tried with the Newton, which, in turn, birthed a series of non-starters such as Go’s tablet computer. IBM (NYSE: IBM) was even in on handwriting recognition for a time. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) had it in a tablet PC version of the uncommonly durable Windows XP operating system.

We tend to forget  that where these others failed, Palm succeeded.

He is absolutely right. Palm Graffiti 2 is still used all over the world on any number of devices via special emulation versions and has the advantages of being quickly learned, easily mastered and extremely open to localization. Handwriting recognition has always been popular with consumers and enterprise customers alike. If Nova is able to make a strong advancement in that already excellent (and unique to Palm) feature, we could see the entire mobile data entry question take a new and interesting turn. Handwriting is a niche that Palm would own from the first day Nova debuted and leave all the others playing catch-up…a very attractive possibility considering the key fear now is that Palm has waited to long to return.

The other hope he sees for Palm is if Nova is a very robust, highly adaptable OS, it could be installed on phones, PDAs, Netbooks (whoops) and anything else that needs an efficient, mobile OS. In short, it could become the default OS of the next generation of converged mobile devices. I had been assuming that Google was aiming Android towards this possibility but now I am not sure that is their goal, and if they could achieve it even if it was. Google seems to be falling prey to the same hardware manufacturer demands and delays that WinMo has. If Palm handles their experience and resources right, (they already have the Foleo design waiting in the wings for one thing, could it become the first Nova Netbook?), they may be able to have the same flexibility that Apple does, creating both hardware and software…only more affordably. Could Nova be the first OS to truly take advantage of convergence and cloud computing. What sort of advantages would be found if all of your devices spoke the save language and shared a single OS? Now THAT would be interoperability.

Come on Palm, we are all pulling for you…amaze us.

Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).