Over the past several years, Palm has secretly been developing a new class of product, to add to its existing PDA and smartphone lines. The new category will be announced by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins at a financial conference in California tomorrow.

Why is this so exciting? Because the new "toy" is being brought to us by the same geniuses who developed the original Palm Pilot and convergent smartphone. When the original Palm Pilot was released, data entry was mainly done using handwriting recognition technology, a nascent stage technology. Other early mobile devices like the Apple Newton failed to gain traction because engineers could not train devices to learn millions of variations of individual handwriting styles sufficiently well. Palm taught its users a single style called Graffiti, and in doing so gave us the first truly usable and widely accepted PDA.

The company also made large portions of the operating source code available to the third party development community. So software engineer entrepreneurs were able to write fabulous software for the Palm device. This open architecture approach greatly enhanced the power of Palm Pilots.

A few years later Palm innovated "convergence" by fusing PDA, camera, email, and web browsing functionality into the Treo smartphone. They also added amazingly comfortable qwerty-keyboards to mobile phones, making handwriting recognition unnecessary. The Treo 180 and later the Treo 600 were truly magnificent breakthrough products. Recently a wide array of competing devices from manufactures such as Nokia, Motorla, Samsung and HTC were released. Palm invented such a massively popular approach to mobile computing that some analysts say convergent smartphone devices make up 6% of all mobile phone sales in the United States, and could someday soon reach 30% market penetration.

Will Jeff Hawkins dazzle us again? We wouldn't be surprised. He has been coy about specifics. But we know from his public statements that the device will be a mobile computer of some variation that takes advantage of high speed data networks. Some bloggers are suggesting that Palm will announce a Linux platform PDA because the company advertised a Linux software coding position recently. We wonder if perhaps Palm is making its first foray into the ultra-mobile PC market.

We believe ultra-portable PCs are going to become a tremendously popular product class because desktop-equivalent processors and mega memory can now be incorporated into tiny form factors. Companies like OQO, Sony and HTC have released first generation products that run Windows XP and Vista with spectacular hardware specifications. However, so far existing products have not been widely adopted because of usability issues, such as uncomfortable keyboards and heavy batteries.

We can only speculate if Palm is bringing Treo-like usability to the ultra-portable PC space, if Palm is releasing a Linux PDA, or it Palm's founder Jeff Hawkins has an entirely new product in mind. In any case, because Mr. Hawkins is one of the great computer visionaries of all time, and Palm has demonstrated incredible foresight and capability in the area of mobile computing, we are waiting with baited breath to find out.