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Although conventional wisdom has Palm pegged as a company whose best days are behind it, the company's got other ideas about its future. Apparently, Palm’s been busy developing new products and a platform to run them on.

As we reported earlier this week, a leaked Vodafone product roadmap showed a couple of new Windows Mobile smartphones, codenamed Wanda and Drucker, coming to Europe (and perhaps elsewhere) later this year. Now comes word from Palm Infocenter that the PDA pioneer not only has yet another, third, smartphone in the works, but that that device is being used to test its long-delayed Linux-based follow up to the Palm OS, which now has an internal codename of its own.

The smartphone in question's codename is Zeppelin (someone is apparently into the recent Led Zeppelin reunion) and Palm is calling the new operating system Nova. And while not much else is known about Nova, we do know Nova, when it is released, will support legacy Palm OS applications.

Smartphones running on Nova still aren't expected until winter 2009 at the earliest. There may be some partner and developer announcements related to the new mobile platform from Palm later this year, according to Palm InfoCenter, however.

Palm seems to be making good use of the needed infusion of cash, $325 million, it gained last fall when Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm, bought a 27 percent stake company.

It also gained a pair of new board members, one a former Apple CEO and, even more importantly, ex Apple senior VP of hardware engineering and head of the iPod division Jon Rubinstein as Chairman.

Meanwhile, Palm lost $9.6 million (9 cents a share) during its second fiscal quarter, which ended November 30th. A year earlier, it reported profits of $12.7 million. Total revenue dropped to $349.6 million from $392.9 million the same time a year earlier.

On the bright side, smartphone sell through grew by 11 percent from the same period in 2006, hitting 686,000 units and earning Palm $282.4 million.

PDA sales took another dive downward for Palm; dropping by 35 percent from 2006 to 323,000 units, for earnings of $67.2 million.

Palm began cutting costs late in 2008 by laying off about 10 percent of its staff and reassigning others.