On a recent interview of Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Palm, Inc., Hawkins mentions that Palm has three businesses — personal digital assistants (PDAs), the smartphone, and a secret mobile computing related business.

From the interview:

Jeff Hawkins: There is a third business that I’ve been working on but I’m not going to tell you what it is. It’s in mobile computing. It’s something different and it’s in its early stage. We have three businesses at PalmOne. One you don’t even know about, which is just a child. Another is the teenager and the other one is the mature 45-year-old.

Q: Can you give me a better idea about what this "child" technology is?

A: Not really. I’ll give you a couple clues. I always think of mobile computing as personal computing. This long-term vision has led us through everything — first the organizers and now through the smart phone space. It’s like everything a personal computer is. Continue down that path. What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That’s how we come up with new products. So I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s following the consequences of mobile computing.

It is unclear however, if Hawkins was just referring to ‘Mobile Managers’ since Palm does not consider their newly created category as that of PDAs. Sometime May, Palm released the LifeDrive under the new category which is a handheld device running the Palm OS with Bluetooth, WiFi, and a built-in 4GB hard drive.

In any case, Hawkins seems to be thinking about devices similar to internet tablets. Palm has thousands of developers behind it, who would probably port their applications to Palm OS Linux or whichever platform Palm chooses, but the problem is, Palm’s newer operating system, the Palm OS Cobalt as well as the Palm OS Linux are still pretty much vaporware.

 [Thanks Mike.]