Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » When will Access give us a Palm-based Treo?

August 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

When will Access give us a Palm-based Treo?

TAGS: Linux

Not in the near future, but hopefully soon. As this CNET article indicates, PalmSource (Access) is working hard to bring Linux to the Palm platform. I'm not sure what has taken it so long - it's been a year-and-a-half since PalmSource acquired China MobileSoft as an inroad to Linux.

I do know that at least some of the fault lies not with PalmSource, but with the carriers and handset manufacturers. People whine about the Palm platform being old, not realizing that its Garnet (or even Cobalt 6.1) are huge improvements over the existing Palm OS. They're available, but handset manufacturers aren't using them. Not sure why.

At any rate, here are some interesting bits from the CNET interview/article:

Q: Where do things stand right now with the Access Linux Platform?

[Didier] Diaz [VP, Access]: What we set out to do is start from Linux and create a complete, commercially great mobile platform. Linux is considered to be the third platform in the mobile industry. Companies such as Orange have said that moving forward they would support all the three main multitasking operating systems--Windows, Symbian and Linux.

When you try to build a mobile platform from Linux components, you find that you have to optimize some of them. Whether it would be for footprint or performance, you actually have to replace entire components sometimes or create components that do not exist at all. In addition, we are adding some key frameworks or subsystems that are not...in the open source area, so things such as telephony framework and messaging framework.

[Tomihisa] Kamada [CTO, Access]: Let's say only 20 percent of the system can be covered by open source. We develop all the remaining portions.

...

Why Linux? Why choose to go forward with Linux as the underpinning for this operating system?

Diaz: It's been quite a journey. When we announced Palm OS for Linux last year, I would say our goals were to a large extent self-serving. What we wanted was not to have to create our own kernel anymore. Why do this? The kernel doesn't differentiate you a great deal. Why spend our engineering resources on that?

Also from an industry perspective, at the time moving to Linux especially at the kernel level allowed us to leverage all these drivers that are written by the silicon vendors as they bring up their systems.

So to begin with, I would say it was a technical reason. What we found, though, as we said "Palm OS is going to be based on Linux" is that the market came to us saying, "Hey, if you are doing this, we would like to work with you."

Kamada: Mobile phone requirements, especially for 3G, are very complicated. So we do features, such as you can check e-mail, (browse) and (at the same time) receive the phone call. Multitasking is a very essential requirement today. There are not so many choices for multitasking operating systems today--Microsoft, Symbian and Linux. It doesn't make sense to develop a new operating system, a multitasking operating system, from scratch. So Linux is a very natural choice for us.

Posted by Matt Asay on August 29, 2006 08:55 AM

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