Can Palm be saved? Or is the third place smartphone maker past its turnaround point, as Judy Mottl asked in her story today.

After Palm's news of layoffs amid the economic downturn and following another quarterly loss, the drumbeat has begun for the smartphone maker. Barron's quotes Global Crown Capital analyst Pablo Perez-Fernandez saying the holiday season could mark the beginning of the end for Palm.

Despite the recent addition of two Apple brainiacs John Rubinstein and Mike Bell, analysts and more Treo fans are now thinking the same thing: how long Palm can last in the face of fierce competition in the smartphone market and rivals putting slick devices into the market at an even faster pace.

As a longtime Treo devotee from a legion of Palm PDA fans of over a decade, it's hard to see this happen.

My beef for some time has been how the software on the device has just not kept pace with mobile innovation.

It was a slide we hoped wouldn't happen, but one we could see coming three years ago when Palm, having already split itself into two companies - one hardware, one software - sold its software unit that developed the Palm operating system to Access Systems of Japan for $324 million.

At the time, Treo owners debated Palm's ability to support the software on the device with the division out of the house. Palm would later pull itself back from the brink with a $44 million payment to Japan's Access Systems for a perpetual license of the Palm OS operating system. Gartner's Ken Dulaney thought that the Palm OS would likely be history within five years -- with or without a long-term license. As he told InternetNews.com then:

"The likely destination is a Palm OS based on Linux, similar to the operating system Access is selling to phone companies."

That could be one way to secure Palm at this point.