Palm Licenses WebSphere For Its Tungsten PDAs

Future versions of Palm Inc.'s Tungsten handhelds will feature built-in support for IBM's WebSphere Java 2 Micro Edition.

By enabling its hardware with a Java environment, Palm hopes to benefit from the efforts of more than 3 million Java developers worldwide who are already writing apps for that platform.

"You are going to be able to combine the power and promise of Java with the capability and effectiveness of Palm handhelds," says Jonathan Oakes, senior director of enterprise software for Palm.

Corporate users of J2ME on Palm handhelds also will benefit from easier integration with other systems and simplified application development, Oakes says.

Palm will license, for an undisclosed sum, the WebSphere Micro Environment from IBM, making it available for download to Palm's high-end Tungsten handhelds later this summer. Come fall, Tungsten models will carry the software in memory. Oakes says other hardware lines may also include the technology.

Analysts say this is a bid to help the handhelds regain traction in corporate environments. "They've been losing their enterprise market to Microsoft licensees," says Gartner analyst Todd Kort. "This is their only hope of getting back in the game as an alternative to Microsoft's .Net."