I know it's this year's cliché, but you cannot write about the handheld without mentioning the 'M' word.

And the question of business maturity is particularly pertinent. The PDA has reached a critical moment in its short history.

The current state of play is less than promising. European business use is mired at about four per cent, and PDA sales dropped for the past three quarters, although the last quarter has seen some recovery.

And the market faces its biggest threat yet from smartphones and, arguably, super-light cheap laptops and tablets.

There are also cultural issues. The PDA is predominantly a man thing: its proliferation has caused headaches for the IT department, and an exponential rise in business use would raise huge security issues.

So is there a mass market waiting for the taking, or does the destiny of the PDA lie in the bottom drawer next to the once-indispensable Filofax?

Cometh the hour, cometh the Palm. Well, the inventor of this whole industry hopes so anyway.

It has lost some of its shine over recent years and yielded too much executive cool, more to funky mobiles than to competitors.

And it had to deal with more than its fair share of doom-mongering from analysts who saw it as a tasty snack for the Pocket PC crowd with its vast marketing budgets.

Well, it's still standing. And, as bounce backs go, the recent launches of the low-cost Zire and two Tungsten models weren't too bad.

The restructuring into two distinct businesses may be a risk, but it makes sense. PalmSource will push the operating system and seek new partners and investors.

Palm Solutions Group will concentrate on building or buying hardware and software products, and creating partnerships for a serious assault on business markets. Both have ambitious targets.

The first are demographic. It wants consumers and businesses. Then its aims are geographic: getting into China, India and southern Europe.

Is it writing cheques that its marketing budget can't cash? Maybe, but Palm is sensibly calling up the cavalry.

Palm Source is looking for new investors and working increasingly closely with the operating system licensees. Palm Solutions is setting up partnerships with established enterprise players such as IBM and BEA.

It may also benefit from name recognition if the PDA business market grows rapidly; businesses are likely to want one supplier only and to outlaw the use of every other device.

Then there's the small matter of the devices themselves. Tungsten is powerful and gorgeous. The Zire is aimed very firmly at new markets: women, for example.

Palm may succeed brilliantly in clobbering its immediate opposition, but the PDA market itself needs to grow. Having the biggest percentage of not very much is not a great business plan.

And the PDA can fail, certainly as a business tool. There is a potential squeeze between lighter, faster and cheaper laptops and new smartphones from now well-established and trusted brands such as Sony-Ericsson and Nokia.

The two Palm businesses probably have the right, and only, strategy to succeed, but timing is everything. If they had taken the current approach two years ago, we might now be seeing serious results.

Will Palm's be an 'if only' story?