Yesterday, I wrote about how the PDA was rapidly being transformed into the smart phone, so the rumors of the PDA's demise are somewhat exaggerated.

I actually wrote that while looking at a post from Palm Addict about a possible new Palm design. Sammy McLaughlin was virtually hanging about the Patent Office (he's in Manchester, England but the Internet lets you do that) and found an application , from PalmOne, for a device that looks like a "candy bar" phone but flips open to become a PDA.

There is more here than just a new design.

After all, if Palm just has a new PDA-phone design it can simply produce the thing, and market it.

But there's more at stake here.

PalmOne has filed a patent applicatoin because it wants to license the design to one or several mobile phone makers, and collect royalties for each unit sold.

There's only one problem.

The idea of putting a phone into a PDA is so obvious at this point I wonder why the Patent Office would even consider an application. So all PalmOne can really offer is a specific design for such a device, not the idea of one.

Hopefully that will be enough, along with Palm's Chinese software, to keep the company rolling.