It's back to the future for palmOne, which will change its name to Palm, Inc., later this year after buying the rights to the name from PalmSource, officials announced Tuesday.

PalmOne will pay $30 million over the next three-and-a-half years to PalmSource, developers of the Palm operating system, for its 55 percent stake in the Palm Trademark Holding Company.

As part of the deal, palmOne has agreed to let PalmSource keep certain Palm trademarks for the company and its licensees for the next four years.

According to Marlene Somsak, a palmOne spokeswoman, full control of the Palm name has been the company's plans since PalmSource first split from the company in October 2003 and took with it a majority stake in the trademark.

"The Palm brand has just significant customer loyalty and aided and unaided awareness in mobile computing," she said. "We believe that by owning it outright, we'll be able to invest in it appropriately to keep it strong and to build it, so we're really excited about it."

Additional plans for the brand will be announced this summer, Somsak said, to go along with the name change. She's fairly certain palmOne's internal marketing team will work again with San Francisco- and London-based Turner Duckworth on a new logo and colors for the redesigned Palm image.

Officials will also look at whether they want to change their NASDAQ ticker from PLMO, which the company got when it split from PalmSource and acquired Handspring.

Both PalmSource and PalmOne have recently gone through some C-level shakeups: in January 2005, PalmOne CEO Todd Bradley resigned and was later replaced by Ed Colligan; just yesterday David Nagel, PalmSource president, CEO and director, stepped down from his position at the mobile OS developer.

License Renewal
In related news palmOne extended its operating license agreement with PalmSource for another four years. The agreement calls for palmOne to receive minimum royalty payments of $148.5 million, which includes $65 million in calendar years 2007 to 2009, subject to development milestones.

Both palmOne and PalmSource have been repositioning themselves in recent months to meet a challenge to a market it once owned in PDAs (define). The rise of the smartphone, as well as Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system and Research in Motion's BlackBerry, have cut into the market share of the house that Palm built.

For PalmSource repositioning meant acquiring China MobileSoft Limited (CMS) late last year, with plans to create a Linux version of the Palm OS. This would include a Linux edition of Cobalt, the next-generation Palm platform.

A PalmSource representative told us the Linux Palm OS would eventually become the main version of the platform. It would be able to run standard Palm applications through an emulation layer. The company would continue to support the "regular" version of the Palm Platform in parallel to the Linux edition.

PalmOne
The most concrete example of palmOne repositioning itself is the release of the LifeDrive Mobile Manager last week. This device has a 4 gigabyte hard disk drive and is bundled with superior syncing software than other palmOne devices. It enables folks to carry and use many different entertainment and business files.

More interesting are rumors of the PDA pioneer releasing a Windows Mobile phone. You see, although palmOne just renewed its license for the Palm platform, it can still turn to other platforms as well for its devicesSamsung, for example, offers Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian smartphones.

In April, a writer at newswireless.net reported seeing a Windows Mobile Treo 650. He asserted a high-ranking executive for European carrier Orange took out the handset at table with several other people at the Landmark Hotel in London.

When the exec turned the smartphone on, it became evident that the communicator wasn't running the Palm platform, but what would turn out to be Windows Mobile 5.0 instead. The Orange official quickly put the device away before anyone could take a picture.

Last fall, an analyst at Needham & Co. asserted that palmOne admitted it would build a line of Windows Mobile Treos. Even though palmOne denied these specific reports, the company has publicly admitted to being open to evaluating other platforms for its devices to address the desires of customers and the marketplace.

Why not?
Palm vendors can theoretically use the same hardware to support other mobile platforms because today's Palm OS PDAs and smartphones run on ARM processors. And since palmOne split from PalmSource and is a hardware only vendor now, the company is free to pursue alternative operating systems to create more appealing products, help the bottom line, and please shareholders.

It may be in the company's interest to boost the number of platforms supported by its handsets to attract the widest range of consumers and (just as importantly) wireless carriers.