The long awaited split has been in the works for over 18 months. Although for the most part the two business units do act independently already, there are still some odd areas of overlap and interaction that need to be sorted out before everything gets finalized. It will be interesting to see if this very slow process can indeed be completed in the newly announced time frame.
The software/OS group will retain the name Palm while the new hardware company consisting of the former Palm Solutions Group and Handspring will get a new name. Jokes about the new name dominate the Palm message boards with PalmSprings getting a lot of mention. Current Handspring stockholders will wind up collectively owning about 1/3 of the new company with current Palm shareholders collectively owning the other 2/3 of the stock.
To most of us the financial deal isn't very important. We want to know what the new company will come up with in the way of hardware. Handspring has been concentrating solely on the Treo recently, creating niche phones that haven't really broken into the mainstream market. Palm's newest devices have sold fairly well but haven't precisely been overwhelming examples of technology advancements. Sure, they added ARM and OS 5 and finally have high resolution screens, but they just haven't seemed truly innovative when compared with the offerings from other device manufacturers.
So can the two Palm OS vendors who arguably lagged behind in the innovation area in recent days join forces to make that next newest coolest device? I don't know. I hope so, but because Palm still has the lion's share of the device market (mainly from name recognition) I'm not sure that they care about moving the platform forward.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for us) with the announcement that HandEra is out of the device business, I don't know that anyone else can move forward more quickly. Sony tended to take HandEra's ideas and make them more mainstream rather than truly innovate themselves (although they did add MP3 support and a built-in camera before anyone else did) and in my opinion their implementation of many of the ideas they borrowed was subpar. With most of the other manufacturers safely remaining in the niche markets there probably isn't any other competition.
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