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INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
The future of the Palm platform: rosy or uncertain?
By Jason Perlow
For close to a year, there's been intense speculation as to what would befall the fate of Palm OS, ever since PalmSource (the company that owns the OS) was spun off and then became an acquisition target.
In early November 2005, ACCESS Co., Ltd., a little-known Japanese software company with expertise in mobile computing, completed its acquisition of PalmSource, the Palm OS spin off company of Palm, Inc.
"From a strictly technical perspective, there's a lot to like in the new ALP OS."
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Recently, ACCESS briefed Computing Unplugged on its new strategy to bring the Palm OS to embedded Linux. We also discussed how it intends to transition its traditional Palm OS developer community over to its new ALP, the ACCESS Linux Platform, which is now confirmed to be based on Wind River's Platform For Consumer Devices, Linux Edition.
What we know
From a strictly technical perspective, there's a lot to like in the new ALP OS. The traditional single-tasking Kadak kernel in today's Palm OS "Garnet" has now been replaced entirely with the multasking 2.6-based Linux, using embedded systems veteran Wind River's modified real-time Linux kernel and Eclipse-based developer tool set.
This, combined with the GStreamer open source multimedia framework and the ability to run J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) applications, and the SQLite database engine results in a truly enterprise-class embedded operating system that is fully equipped to run the next generation of network-aware multimedia applications. An architectural diagram, provided to us by ACCESS, is shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
Here you can see ACCESS's architectural overview of the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). Roll over picture for a larger image.
With the ALP, very little of what we know today as "Palm OS" actually remains. Like with the current Palm OS, the current base of Palm applications will run in a execution layer that emulates the Motorola 68000 Dragonball EZ processor, the chip which ran the first several generations of PalmPilots and Palm/Palm III/Palm V/Palm VIII/Palm m series PDAs (and several Palm OS OEM units such as the TRGPro and Handspring).
The 68000 processor was eventually retired around 2004 in favor of the ARM architecture used in today's Palm Treo handsets. Some manufacturers, such as Samsung and Kyocera, continue to use the Dragonball architecture in their handset designs, and thus it's unclear as to whether these companies will switch over to the new ALP reference architecture or decide to do something else.
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