Everyone seems to be talking about how much Palm is sucking these days. Truth is they’ve sucked for quite a while, but so did pretty much everyone else. Now Palm’s had straight losses for four quarters in a row. Hmm…I seem to recall another handset that came out a year ago or something like that…but I can’t quite seem to put my finger on it. Oh well, maybe it will come to me.

Here’s what Palm should do if they even want a prayer. Scrap PalmOS. It sucks. Admit it and get on with your lives. Switch your OS to Android. Use all of the most awesome features available. If it’s on the iPhone it had better be on every Palm. Figure out what’s going to be in the next iPhone and put that in too. Finally get POSE and give it hooks into the kernel and make it look transparent. Build a GUI for Android that looks enough like the old PalmOS but is a modern face lift. Bam. You have yourself a brand new platform complete with backward compatibility. Your faithful customers just might stick around. Accept this because they’re all you have left.

Now, this is obvious stuff, it’s not rocket science. This is what they should have started doing last year when Android was announced. If they didn’t do this they deserve to lose. Palm’s only hope is to have a rockin' new phone running Android come August. If they don’t they’ll have to wait two more years drifting off into obscurity until the contracts of everyone who’s buying iPhone 3G’s and Android based phones start to expire. But it will be really hard to lure anyone back by that point. As I alluded to before, Palm’s only strong point right now is application lock in. Once people are so fed up that they’ve jumped ship they’ll have to break someone else’s application lock in.

But I don’t think Ed Colligan is that smart.