It’s costing Palm $44m, to be paid in its third quarter of fiscal year 2007, and will be recognized as an expense over the next several years. But the firm has seen that this single payment eliminates the requirement for it to pay Access continuing royalties of “tens of millions of dollars” over coming years.
The reason that the decision is not wholly unexpected is that although some questioned whether Palm would eventually abandon the use of Palm OS in its devices in favor of Windows Mobile which it also supports on some devices it’s become increasingly clear that Palm sees the ability to innovate at the both the operating system and device level as critical to its ability to differentiate itself from its rivals.
Microsoft ships its Zune digital media player to U.S. store shelves. At the price of $249.99, the Zune device is available at nearly 30.000 U.S. retailers now — more outlets than any other Microsoft product. Available in black, brown and white, the 30GB Zune digital media player will come equipped with wireless functionality for Zune-to-Zune sharing of select music, pictures and home recordings; a bright, 3-inch LCD video screen that works in portrait or landscape mode to display pictures and videos; and a built-in FM tuner.