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Originally Posted by surur
The point is that they are hardly going to write an e-mail client and web browser for POS Garnet. We all know Garnet is not the future. If they are writing for the future, its either going to be WM or their own Linux. If they are going ALP, it will come with an e-mail and very good web browser. So will WM (and they dont mention WM experience at all). The obvious inference is that they are ignoring ALP and going their own way.
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The problem, as I think you well know, is that ALP is at least a year a way and could take another year to 18 months to be turned into the first Palm products. I agree that Garnet as it exists today is not the future, but Palm needs a short-term future as well as a long term one for Palm OS. This is where the kind of stop-gap Garnet-oriented Linux platform I described might come into play. But there's another possibility that I haven't discussed: Garnet has a preemptive multi-tasking kernel that with the right framework added to it could support multitasking much like Linux, Windows Mobile, and Symbian do. That framework would not be able to run existing Palm applications, but it might be written to exist side by side with the PACE environment to run some ROM applications within their own processes. In other words, take the diagram I presented and substitute the Garnet kernel for Linux. Call it Garnet 2. Again, this might be something that Palm would plan to use just for 2 or 3 years until it's had time to assess ALP and the result of it's own Linux work.
Garnet 2 would need non-Palm OS applications designed to run on the new framework, same as a Linux platform would. Email and browser would be among them since those would be applications that would most improve the multitasking capabilities of the platform. The Phone application would be the other one that would be critical to enable Garnet 2 phones to run on UMTS networks. Those jobs could be for new Garnet 2 browser and email applications for all we know.
Garnet 2 would still be a big undertaking. Once you get outside the existing application framework I'm not sure whether there is enough of a system left to bother building on. I'm somewhat skeptical that Palm would invest the time if they wanted to start building their Linux chops for the future. But like I said: Palm needs to be able to support the shift to 3G on the GSM networks and they probably know better than the rest of us how far mobile Linux has to go before it's ready to deliver the kind of experience that Palm users expect on a 3G phone. If there isn't going to be a way to get Palm OS running on Linux quickly enough, maybe they'd hire some ex-PalmSource engineers to help them hack an extra private framework onto the side of Garnet.
Bottom line: ALP's future on Palm hardware looks murky, but it's still too early to say for sure. If Palm is creating a stop-gap OS they only plan to use for a couple of years that's not exactly something they'd want to advertise by getting all enthusiastic about ALP in public, is it? Given their current predicament, I don't blame them for holding their cards pretty close.