Palm co-founder Jeff Hawkins indicated several times over the past year that he is working on a third category of product - not PDA or smartphone - for the company. For example, he once told Business 2.0, "One of the missions we have at Palm is to design breakout products. It's hard, really hard, to do. Palm's done it twice, you could argue, with the original PalmPilot, and the Treo smartphone. We've got another one in development."

Nothing else is really known about this mysterious device. And there has been speculation that Hawkins project may never come to fruition.

Not so, according to Michael Mace, former VP of Product Planning at Palm and PalmSource Chief Competitive Officer. On his blog, Mace mentions he recently spoke to Palm CEO Ed Colligan, whereupon he asked if we'd see Hawkins's secret project in 2007.

The CEO answered yes, but wouldn’t give anymore details beyond that.

What exactly that secret project consists of remains a mystery. With Business 2.0, Hawkins noted that he makes test models to carry in his pocket out of foam today and not plywood like he did with the original Pilot.

In the Portland Business Journal in July 2005, Hawkins said this about his current project:

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. "

Mace notes that over a year ago Palm moved a "number of bright people" to work on this project.