Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
Garnet is the formal name for PalmOS 5. It was developed by Access for Palm way back when. Last fall Access released a Virtual Machine (VM) that let us run PalmOS software on Nokia's Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810). Today they just announced an updated version.
Access is developing the next generation PalmOS on its own, to run on its devices. IT is going to be backward compatible (to some degree). They released this VM so Palm fanatics could keep using their favorite software until Access is ready to release the next operating system.
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Actually,
Palm is developing the next generation PalmOS.
Palm's former OS division was spun off some years back as an independent company called Palmsource, in part to try to boost Palm's lagging stock price, and in part to placate major Palm OS licensee Sony, who used Palm OS in their Clie line, and were uncomfortable about having OS development in the hands of a competitor in the PDA market.
Sony subsequently decided to exit the PDA market. (The Clie line was profitable, but not profitable
enough.) The drop in licensing revenues caused by Sony's withdrawal left Palmsource in a poor position, and they put themselves on the market. Palm tried to buy them back, but got outbid by Japan's ACCESS corp., who wanted an OS to offer to the burgeoning Asian smartphone market.
Palmsource had been developing Cobalt, the intended PalmOS 6, which would feature a multitasking, multithreading kernel. Cobalt was reportedly completed, but nobody, including Palm, licensed it. ACCESS announced plans to implement an embedded Linux kernel with Cobalt as the UI layer. Palm apps would talk to Cobalt, Cobalt would talk to Linux, and Linux would talk to the hardware.
What ACCESS wound up actually doing was implementing Palm OS Garnet (OS 5) as a virtual machine running on an embedded Linux kernel, to provide a measure of compatibility with existing Palm OS applications. (The Garnet VM executes as a Linux program.) They are shopping the ALP (Access Linux Platform) to vendors interested in implementing it in smartphones. It will be interesting to see how they compete with Google's Android OS and the OpenMoku offering. They offer a beta of the VM as a stand alone product, available as a free download for the Nokia Tablet line. According to an ACCESS rep, it's largely OS version independent, and one of their engineers was able to bring it up on a different Linux kernel than ACCESS uses internally in about a day (Mostly a matter of changing some DEFINES in header files and doing a new build.)
Palm, meanwhile, has been working with Wind River systems on their own next gen OS. They have passed on ALP, and have no plans to use the ACCESS offering in Palm devices. Wind River has a long history in embedded development, starting with their own VXWorks OS and later offering Linux based OS products. It appears that Wind River is providing an optimized Linux kernel for ARM devices, while Palm builds the stuff that will run on top of it. Palm also paid ACCESS for a perpetual source code license to Garnet to insure availability and right to modify the code.
Palm OS II (or whatever they wind up calling it) isn't scheduled to hit the streets before 2009, so no one knows right now what the product will look like or do. I assume a fair bit of compatibility with existing Palm apps, but I don't know whether they are using a VM approach of have something more closely integrated. When Palm canceled their Foleo product, one reason given was the desire to complete their new OS, which would serve as a base for any future product. This leads to speculation about whether Palm might offer a new version of the Foleo based on Palm OS II, and whether Palm has plans down the road for
any devices that
aren't smartphones.
We'll see.
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Dennis