Great news today. Apparently Palm is buying Be for $11 million in Palm stock.

This is exactly what Palm needs. The problem with PDAs, from the Newton to the Psion, to the Palm and, to a slightly lesser degree, WinCE, is that while they're great at manipulating snippets of information, they have lacked real multimedia capability. Playing MP3s on a handheld or any sort of video requires a really specialized application, and they're nowhere near as adept at handling multimedia data streams as even a cellular phone is. The OS just isn't built that way.

Enter BeOS. After showing such promise as a multimedia OS at the expense of all else, it couldn't find a market and has been foundering for the last three years. It's already been demonstrated that other OSes can be emulated in the Be environment, and PalmOS has already been ported successfully to other desktop platforms. All that's left is for Palm to pull an Apple and graft the existing PalmOS onto the slick media-centric BeOS and put it all into a tight m700-style case with a G3 cell connection.

This would be the machine that lives up to the hype. IT would be the knowledge navigator that fits in your pocket and can handle realtime video as easily as the current PalmOS can handle appointments. Bandwidth will be the sole remaining bottleneck to the full solution, and G3 systems should take care of that. Storage space will be irrelevant as the Palm will be (literally) a thin client, grabbing music, video, and videocommunications through the network.

Okay, so I'm waxing a little Dick Tracy here and we've heard it all before, but speaking as a former Newton programmer, I just want to say how vital a step it is to create a handheld OS with deep multimedia underpinnings, and I can actually say that I'm glad that Be ended up going to Palm instead of Apple (though sadly at one tenth the $125 million Amelio offered for Be just a few years ago).

And the future chugs along...