Letter from Access to PalmOS developers

[Bob Russell]

The acquisition of PalmSource by Access is now complete according to a letter to PalmOS developers from the founders of Access (Toru Arakawa and Tomihisa Kamada).

It also seems that they have fine tuned their public relations a bit, because this letter is much more reassuring than comments that made the news early after the purchase was announced.

The primary points seem to be:
1) The acquisition of PalmSource is complete
2) Access is committed to the "embedded software technology space"
3) Access is "committed to supporting PalmSource's ongoing development work on Palm OS for Linux"
4) Access is "committed to continuing to support all current offerings of Palm OS and its contracts with customers"
5) Access wants developers to feel they are valued and encourages them to continue developing PalmOS applications
6) Through Access, PalmOS developers will now be able to market for "an even wider market of PDAs, phones and other mobile devices"

I have been on the edge of my seat awaiting news from Access, so this is a welcome bit of news. But I suppose I may have to wait longer than I had expected for the new name. No word yet from Access about when that is coming, but when I looked back at the original news from the purchase of the Palm name by PalmOne, I was a bit sad to see that there is a 4 year transition period where PalmSource is allowed to use the Palm name. It's not clear to what extent they can use it, or how much advantage there would be to Access to make the name change more quickly, but I don't know of any near term deadline.

In related news, Palm Insider is reporting an interesting rumor: "It seems PalmSource is planning to come with something new in February and this may explain why Palm and Verizon will show Treo 700w at CES in January 2006."

Could this be the name change, or maybe even an updated timeline for PalmOS for Linux? The excitement surrounding PalmOS may grow considerably in the coming months!

(via PalmAddict and PalmInsider.)