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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Getting the Treo 600 into the hands of business users is job number one for PalmSource (Quote, Chart), the company said Wednesday.

While the converged phone/PDA is made by sister company palmOne (Quote, Chart), it runs the operating system made by PalmSource. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based mobile software maker sees the enterprise market as the key to growth, with wireless delivery of applications to its converged devices.

In January, PalmSource launched an online store that lets wireless subscribers buy and download applications; the store offers close to 50 applications to date. PalmSource hopes that making those apps and lots more available through wireless network operators as well will create more demand for devices running its operating system.

The challenge for PalmSource, however, is that the Treo (originally made by Handspring) was targeted at the millions of people who haven't made the leap from telephony to wireless data, according to Palm founder, former Handspring exec and current PalmSource chairman Jeff Hawkins.

"We assumed PDA users would come along. They'd be the early adopters," he said. In the short term, with the Treo 600's street price of $500, it's mostly a gadget for business users.

In a question and answer session at PalmSource's developers' conference here, Hawkins acknowledged the barriers to widespread take-up of what he called "platform phones".

"To get beyond a few million [units]," he said, "you have to be closer to mainstream pricing."

Wireless network operator Sprint PCS (Quote, Chart) has offered the Treo, as well as other converged devices, for some time. But they still remain a small percentage of phones on the network, according to Terry Yu, vice president of product marketing for Sprint. Letting users download applications over the air, rather than users having to synch the device with a desktop computer, is the key to making them more attractive to business users, he told internetnews.com.

"The next wave of enterprise computing is figuring out how to use mobility to increase the usefulness of applications," he said. "The result will be additional productivity and cost savings."

The Treo 600 is the first device on the Sprint network to allow wireless application downloading. To date, only Sprint's Business Connection wireless e-mail product, introduced three years ago, can be delivered wirelessly. Encouraging for PalmSource's master plan; palmOne said the Treo 600 is now available to T-Mobile USA customers starting this week.

To help garner more development on future Treo phones, the company is launching its Palm Powered Mobile World. The initiative is expected to act as a bridge between the approximately 275,000 independent software developers and the wireless network operators that can deliver their applications to end users -- and get them paid for.

Of course, both QUALCOMM's BREW (define) platform and Sun Microsystems' J2ME (define) allow platform phone users to buy and download applications over the air. Both are mobile software delivery infrastructures for network operators that let them sell downloadable apps to subscribers.

Hawkins said that BREW and Java weren't sophisticated enough for the applications available on the Palm OS.