The BFC Computing Weblog

I just notice over at Businessweek, there’s a big shakeup at Palm today. They sold a quarter of the company to an investment group, kicked out the CEO, and Jon Rubenstein, former hardware VP at Apple, is taking over and is going to be working with Jeff Hawkins on their new products.

For those of you who don’t assiduously watch this space, that new product is a linux-based smartphone to launch at the end of this year.

Apple went too early with the iPhone, wanted to do something new with cell phones (good), got turned down by Verizon (expected) and got stuck on Cingular (bad). Now, you have to be a Cingular customer to own an iPhone and they’re in that deal for five years. This will be the first category of Apple products I won’t own. There ain’t no service here on AT&T and if I lived five miles to the right they couldn’t even write me a contract.

I will, however, buy Palm’s answer to the iPhone, assuming it’s no worse than my Treo (that would be hard). I think they learned some of the ‘obvious’ clues from Apple, the networks all get that they missed out on the iPhone, and they’ll work with Palm. So the iPhone will be available on AT&T and the Palm Treo replacement (Quatro?) will be on Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, MVNO’s, Skype, SIP, etc.

Let me tell you about this device called a Newton…