Jeff Hawkins will show the new baby in May

In case you missed it, there's a long interview with Jeff Hawkins of Palm over on PalmAddicts. In the interview, Hawkins hints very strongly that he'll show the company's new "third category" device in May.

"We’re going to be announcing something…but I won’t tell you what it is…we will be launching this year, not in the distant future. I’ll give you a much bigger hint: I’m going to be speaking at Walt Mossberg’s D Conference in May. It’s a high-end industry conference. Anyway, I’m going to be giving a talk there, and that would be something for the Palm fans to keep a close watch on."

That should be enough to get the rumor mill cranked up again.

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By the way, I apologize for the shortage of posts recently. I had the opportunity to work on a couple of papers with Prof. Joel West of San Jose State, discussing the iPhone and some other interesting subjects. They ate into my blogging time. I'll let you know when the papers are available.

Joel has an interesting blog on open strategies. It's worth checking out.

5 comments:

Eduardo Cruz said...

Hello Michael, will you publish at some point those iphone related papers you mention in this post?

Best regards.

B said...

I agree Michael, and strongly suspect Jeff Hawkins might pull his own version of
Steve Jobs's "One More Thing" at D and pull out his secret device.

Merely dropping more vague hints would be pretty lame. He'll have a perfect opportunity to unveil his vision to the world at what is becoming *the* premiere tech industry event.

If Palm's new "third category" truly is revolutionary, he'd be remiss if he squandered that opportunity.

Michael Mace said...

Eduardo wrote:

>>will you publish at some point those iphone related papers you mention in this post?

We're going to try to get them placed in an academic journal (which is to say, Joel is going to try to get them placed and I will cheer him on since I know nothing about that process).

Assuming that they're accessible online, I'll post a pointer to them. And thanks for asking.


Brian wrote:

>>Merely dropping more vague hints would be pretty lame.

Good point. He has now raised expectations enough that anything less than a full demo would be a disappointment.

Anonymous said...

When I saw the schedule for D, I predicted that it would be the venue for the Palm launch. Now it looks like he has confirmed it. Nice.

Jobs and Gates on stage together too...

It will be a pretty amazing conference. You should go.

Or send me to be your eyes and ears - just like old times... *grin*

- chris

Michael Mace said...

(In case you're wondering, Chris and I used to work together at Palm.)

It's sold out, Chris. We're both too late.

In marketing terms, Jeff has given himself an interesting mountain to climb. It'll be hard to avoid being overshadowed by the theatricality of Gates and Jobs being on stage together.

On the other hand, if Jobs and Gates are boring, maybe Jeff will come off looking good. High risk, high reward.