Its just a small blip on the periphery at the moment but like HTC and Apple, if Palm moves in the direction of UMPCs, things could change very quickly.

I’m talking about some comment by Ed Hansbury at pocketpcthoughts. Michael Mace, a former VP at Palm was present at a talk given by the Palm CEO and asked him about a project that Jeff Hawkins (Palm founder and CTO) had mentioned a while back. A secret third product category that Palm were looking at. Michael asked Ed whether we would see this project in 2007. Ed said ‘yes.’

Here’s Michael’s blog entry.

All that’s known is that its a mobile solution. Helpful eh! If it fits somewhere in alongside phones and PDA’s then you either go down the chain to smaller devices or up the chain to the uber-smartphone bracket that HTC could also be looking at. x86-based smartphones running full operating systems. Also known as UMPC’s with cellular data capability?

Of course we don’t know any facts at all (this is worse that the Apple Tablet rumor!) but I just want to put a stake in the ground (a blog on the journal) to remind myself to re-visit this one.

Steve.