Last week, Palm missed sales estimates for its last fiscal quarter, warned it would come in below expectations for the next, and the iPhone – a fierce new competitor - launched. Now comes word that Palm OS II, its Linux-based follow up to the aging Garnet flavor of the Palm OS won't be ready when originally thought.

In his keynote at the company's Investor Day in April, Palm CEO Ed Colligan said Palm would release devices based on its new in-house mobile platform before the end of the year. During a recent conference call, however, Colligan changed his tune, saying "Products based on the new Linux-based platform that we're working on, that won't be until some time next year," reports Brighthand.

That leaves Palm left with only Windows Mobile and Garnet for its products for the foreseeable future. So rather than new smartphones built on a brand-new and up-to-date 'Palm OS,' we'll only see new devices built on these already supported mobile-device platforms.

Today, Palm offers about an even number of Windows Mobile and Garnet-run Treo models.

While Palm's announcement in April of it developing an in-house Linux OS for its smartphone's wasn't a surprise, it almost certainly meant the company would not be supporting PalmSource's (now ACCESS) ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP), ending an era or cooperation between the two companies, which at one time were one.

The last remaining ties Palm has to ACCESS is their shared interest in Garnet, which Palm can do whatever it wants with since it paid $44 million for a perpetual license to that platform's source code in 2006.

Like ACCESS with ALP and its Garnet emulation layer, Palm has plans to integrate Garnet code into its next-generation OS, so users can run existing Palm applications on future Palm devices.

Unlike ACCESS, a software company only, Palm plans to keep its Linux OS close to the vest by not licensing it out to other hardware vendors for their smartphones.

Perhaps it sees the licensing of the Palm OS and eventual spin-off of PalmSource as the sources of its current difficulties.