Palm cuts jobs

The US PDA and Smartphone vendor Palm started cutting jobs last week. Financial news agency Bloomberg quotes company spokeswoman Lynn Fox, who reportedly said that Palm is seeking profitability and long-term growth, which results in company reductions in the US and internationally. It was not disclosed how many of the approximately 1,050 current employees will have to go.

Palm slid even deeper into the red in the last quarter. At the end of the quarter finished in August, the vendor recorded a deficit of $42M. The company's current rehabilitation measures are further complicated by the strong competition from companies like the Canadian Blackberry vendor RIM and Apple's iPhone.

Oddly, Palm does not own its own flagship operating system, PalmOS. In 2005, Japanese mobile software developers the Access Company bought PalmSource, developers of the classic PalmOS 5 "Garnet" OS as well as its never-released successor PalmOS 6, an all-new, modular, multitasking, multimedia-capable system developed by engineers from Be, the company formed by ex-Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée to develop the BeBox computer and BeOS "media OS". Recently, Access announced its Access Linux Platform (ALP), a Linux-based Palm-compatible OS.

Despite this, and the fact that it has no real prior Linux experience, Palm is currently developing its own new Linux-based operating system. According to the report, this is due for release next year.

(lghp)