palmOne Trying to Create New Category of Mobile-Computing Products

palmOne has long been known as a maker of handhelds and smartphones. Now it also wants to be known as a maker of a new class of portable electronics: the mobile manager.

palmOne has identified three main customer segments and created a product line for each of them.

Handhelds are for customers whose first and foremost interest is in basic organization tools, such as calendar and contacts. These customers often add additional applications and music and images to their handhelds, but their goal is organization.

palmOne's Tungsten and Zire models are in this category.

Smartphones users' primary interest is in a device that is a mobile phone that also delivers email access and organization functions.

palmOne's Treo line is in this category.

Mobile managers are designed for customers who are eager to take full advantage of the trend toward "digital everything" -- from documents and email to music, images and video, as standalone files or in organized folders.

"In studying customer trends, we found that some people want to carry dozens of documents and hundreds of songs while others want to carry a thousand-plus photos and enjoy videos," said Page Murray, palmOne vice president of marketing. "Organization functions were highly valued by nearly all our customers, but some wanted much more business and personal file-management capabilities. We listened and will deliver a new category of mobile-computing product that will let customers fuse their own mix of personal and business content in ways never before possible in either handheld computers or smartphones."

A New Device?

Although palmOne is talking about its new category of mobile devices, it isn't announcing a mobile manager today. However, the company says it is going to release its first product in this category later this month.

This isn't the first time the company has done something like this; in 2002 it announced the Zire and Tungsten sub-brands about a month before the first models in these groups were released.

According to rumor, the first mobile manager will be called the LifeDrive, and it will include a 4 GB hard drive.

More information on the LifeDrive is available in this article.

Related Links

• Amazon Leaks Release Date for the LifeDrive
• There Won't Be a Zire 73
• Will palmOne Become Another Apple?