Palm Orders 5 Million Smartphones for 2009

Palm, Inc. is reportedly placed orders with Taiwan's Compal Communications for as many as 5 million smartphones. These devices will be manufactured and delivered in 2009.

Not surprisingly, the report from the China Economic News Service has few details on the products to be produced, other than the orders are for several smartphone models, not just one, and they will run Microsoft's mobile operating system.

This report indicates that Palm is outsourcing both the design and manufacture of these Windows Mobile smartphones to Compal. This wouldn't be put of character for Palm, as it has turned to ODM's in the past. Asus created the Treo 500v, for example.

No Nova Here

The report from CENS makes it clear that the products Compal is acting as a Palm's ODM for will be based on Microsoft software. This means that they won't run the next version of the Palm OS, code-named Nova, that will debut next year.

Palm has implied that it is doing the design for the first Nova smartphones itself, but it's not known at this point who will be manufacturing them.

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