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Originally Posted by 5thWiggle
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Hmmm, Interesting.
Japan's Access Corp. is largely known for the NetFront mobile device browser, intended for embedded usage. A version of NetFront used to be bundled with Sony Clie PDAs running Palm OS. (I believe a version of NetFront is the basis for the bundled browser used in Amazon's Kindle.)
Back when, Palm spun off the Palm OS development operations as PalmSource (largely to placate Sony, who were uncomfortable with the OS used in their Clie line being developed by the outfit the Clie competed with.) Sony then dropped the Clie lina and got out of the PDA business. PalmSource revenues plummeted, and they put themselves up for sale. Palm tried to buy them back, but Access Corp. offered a higher price, and go them.
Access announced plans to use the completed but never shipped Palm OS Cobalt (which would have been Palm OS 6) as the UI layer for a Linux based based OS targeting the Asian smartphone market, to provide compatibility with thousands of existing Palm apps. What they wound up actually doing in their Access Linux Platform was implementing Palm OS 5 (Garnet) as a virtual machine running under Linux. Free beta versions of the VM are available for the Nokia Internet Tablet line under their Maemo Linux environment.
So essentially, these days, Access owns what used to be Palm OS, and they've done a port of Palm's Grafitti handwriting recognition to Android.
There are other interesting things there, too, like an Android port of NetFront.
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Dennis