Ars Technica reports: As every diligent journalist who's preparing to go to CES in January already knows, Palm has something up its sleeve and is desperate to show it off to anyone who will listen. That something, it turns out, is Nova, a brand new operating system from the much-maligned PDA and smartphone maker, as well as a handful of new products that will run it. The company hopes that Nova will help revive the company's offerings in a time when the BlackBerry and iPhone dominate smartphone sales, but Palm will have to fight if it wants a spot at the top.

The company opened its kimono this morning in an attempt to generate buzz before the official unveiling in just a few weeks, saying that it hopes Nova and its accompanying products will bridge the gap between the seriousness of the BlackBerry and the fun of the iPhone. "People's work and personal lives are melding," Palm CEO Ed Colligan told BusinessWeek. He said that the company was aiming for the "fat middle of the market"--the presumably large part of the mobile market that falls in between the two incredibly popular devices.

Nova--the details of which remain hidden for the time being--is meant to run on a number of different consumer devices, the company said, in order to let people do things like play sophisticated games while also managing corporate e-mail. Curiously, Palm's execs directly cite the iPhone as the device that comes closest to addressing these different needs, but points to its battery life (of all things) as the reason why it cannot address these different markets simultaneously. Indeed, the iPhone 3G's battery life leaves a lot to be desired (especially by road warriors), but is Palm planning to release an iPhone clone with a magically-massive battery, or is it trying to innovate with new products?

Unnamed sources speaking to BusinessWeek said that they believe Palm plans to use your personal data to do things like e-mailing you the day before a trip with weather conditions in the destination city, but features like that aren't going to be enough to make a serious dent in either Apple's or RIM's market share. At the same time, Palm doesn't seem to have exceedingly lofty expectations for Nova--the company seems to be aiming for two percent of the mobile market at first.

From now until CES, Palm's greatest enemy will be... Palm. The company doesn't have much of a reputation for meeting its own deadlines, so hinting at its plans beforehand in this case seems like a risky move unless Palm has changed its ways and is extremely confident about a public unveiling in four weeks. It has a lot riding on Nova--and unless the OS is mindblowing in terms of innovation, Palm risks boring gadget freaks and fading further into a shell of itself.

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