Palm Gadgets

Palm, Inc., is the company that created the PDA market. As explained in Chapter 2, the PalmPilot is believed to be the first successful PDA product (Palm has recently started to use Microsoft Windows Mobile for Smartphone on some of its smart phone products.). Palm OS is the underlying operating system for Palm PDAs. Palm also licenses Palm OS to other PDA manufacturers such as Handspring (merged with Palm in 2003), Sony, and IBM. Officially, the company that develops Palm OS is Palm Source, a spin-off from PalmOne, the new name of Palm, Inc., after it merged with Handspring. (Interestingly, PalmOne changed its name back to Palm, Inc., in 2005.) PalmOne is the PDA maker of a few product lines including Palm V, Tungsten, Zire, and Treo.

Palm OS up to version 4 follows a simplified design philosophy: making use of limited computing power to allow efficient operations. Applications on Palm devices are mostly consumer oriented and have an excellent user-friendly interface. The most notorious drawback of the old versions of Palm OS is a lack of multitasking support; the system can only run a single application at a time, like early DOS systems. This drawback did not seem to matter when only a few applications were available on the PDAs, and execution of those applications was generally fast without significant delay. As users began to demand more functionality, such as mobile telephony and PAN/LAN access, applications on Palm PDAs became more versatile and sophisticated, requiring a more advanced operating system to facilitate software development. In response to this trend, Palm designed Palm OS version 5 and 6, which have incorporated a wide range of improvements.

A major design goal of Palm OS 5 is to move from 68000 (or 68K) processors to several ARM processors such that Palm OS 5 can be executed on a broader hardware base. At the same time, Palm OS 5 is backward compatible with legacy Palm applications, thanks to the built-in Palm Application Compatibility Environment (PACE).

In addition, Palm OS 5 supports multitasking, cryptographic provider management (CPM) with default crypto provider, mobile telephony, wireless PAN capabilities, and better graphical user interface (GUI) support. Palm OS 6 (Cobalt) is a milestone in Palm OS history. It is a complete rewrite of Palm OS and is the first Palm OS to support multithreading. It also provides more wireless capability, multimedia application support, and a variety of extension slots support. Some Palm OS applications are expected to be ported to Linux in the future, according to Palm Source, Inc.

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