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Old 11-03-2004, 10:02 AM   #3
hacker
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Posts: 617
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: East Lyme, CT
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All of this is irrelevant, because Palmsource does not produce the Treo line of devices.

pa1mOne makes the Treo, and there is a very specific reason why they split from Palmsource... so they could entertain putting other OS versions on their hardware. Yes, their current devices use PalmOS, but there's no reason why they have to continue to do so.

The move to ARM was NOT to provide threading in the OS. That capability exists, and always has... but Palm's use of it is forbidden by license, not technology. Palm's license to the KADAK kernel used in PalmOS only allows them to expose one thread to the OS itself. This was a bad choice on their part back in 1996, when they started to use KADAK as their kernel.

Moving to ARM devices allows pa1mOne to provide faster processors and other additional capabilities to court the ability to put alternate OS versions on the hardware.

In a cut-throat market where Microsoft's portable OS (in various versions) controls a good 50% or more of the handheld devices in customer hands, it makes sense for pa1mOne to offer their hardware with the Microsoft OS as a possible option. There is absolutely nothing preventing them from putting Symbian, Microsoft, Linux, FreeBSD, PalmOS, or anything else they want on the devices, if it makes financial and technical sense to do so.
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