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Palm Assumes Control of Palm OS Garnet

Posted by Feico Mol on December 7, 2006 07:37 PM

Treo and PalmOS news

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Palm revealed today that it has received a perpetual license for the Palm OS Garnet source code as well as expanded rights from ACCESS Co. to their patents in a deal valued at $44 million. Garnet is the code used in the operating system of the Treo smartphone, Palm's flagship product. As part of the deal, Palm received the right to develop its own code on top of the existing operating system.

This is a strong indication that Palm may be planning to develop its own operating system outside of its cooperation with ACCESS. Palm was the exclusive developer of the Palm operating system until it spun off its software division as Palmsource, Inc. a few years ago. After Palmsouce failed as a standalone company because it could not attract manufacturing partners, it sold itself to ACCESS Co of Japan. Around the time of acquisition, Palm bought back from Palmsource the exclusive rights to its software brand, particularly the Palm and Palm OS trade marks.

We at mytreo.net believe this is exceptionally good news for the Treo community! We strongly believe in Palm's ability to develop both software and hardware technology excellently, and have had growing concerns about the development of the Palm OS by ACCESS. Palm recently made it known in a financial report that ACCESS was not meeting its development deadlines, releasing Palm from further financial obligation to them. It seemed that Palm's only alternative was to focus on Windows Mobile products. Now we know otherwise!

Related Links

Read the press release on Palm.com.

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Comments

December 8, 2006 05:29 PM {#}

JackG058 says:

Yes! Now perhaps we can have some expectations to get some of these bugs worked out. The 700p is way overdue for bug fixes, for the lags and for the bluetooth disconnects, to name a couple.

The Palm OS is slimmer and quicker than the Windows version, so I'm hopeful that the Treo will continue to be marketed with the Palm OS. I've been using Palm OS for years now, and I love the accumulation of programs I have, and which I want to keep using.

December 8, 2006 08:37 PM {#}

davenport says:

Hopefully we'll see a 750p at some point, so those of us who'd rather die than use any Windows OS can take advantage of the upgrade!

December 8, 2006 09:08 PM {#}

unclenate says:

Maybe they'll finally license the Flash Lite player as well... I've been frothing at the mouth for years to build Flash apps for palm devices...

December 10, 2006 09:29 PM {#}

koreth says:

Ugh, just what we need, more time being wasted on that rickety old operating system. I'd much rather see Palm spend their time on, say, the "Palm OS on top of Linux" project they announced with great fanfare a while back then never mentioned again. Or even the Cobalt version of the OS, once again announced with a big splash then quietly ignored thereafter.

The Palm OS user interface is fine with me, but the underlying technology is a complete dead end. Palm clearly recognizes that or they wouldn't have announced two different projects to replace it.

It's not just an academic technical matter. I want to be able to, say, reply to an SMS message while I'm running my note-taking application without having to quit the note-taking app and later launch it again and navigate my way back to where I left off.

December 11, 2006 02:46 AM {#}

meluvtreo says:

Great news! I've been pondering the idea of a new PDA phone lately as I have been using my 650 for about 2 years now. The temptation of switching to WM5 has been quite strong, primarily because Palm has made so little progress in putting out a new generation of O/S. But I'm a Palm fans from the very beginning. If this is going to mean that Palm will have a O/S 6 or 7, I will definitely be waiting for it! Just hope that it won't take too long...

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