Jonatan from ClieVideo was kind enough to send some nice pics of the Cobalt (PalmOS 6)-based phone that he bought at the Palm Developer’s Conference. This is the first PalmOS 6 device to get widely known as such.
Pics of the Cobalt phone
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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i’m still waiting for a treo with wifi to replace my 600.. 650 doesn’t add that much worth spending lots of bucks again – but PalmOS 6 sounds indeed interesting
ok this is probably a stupid question, but…it shouldn’t be…anyway, will older Palms, like the Zire 72 be upgradeable to Cobalt? Or is Cobalt for new devices only?
PalmOS 5 doesn’t run natively on Xscale processors – there’s a software emulation layer. Cobalt runs natively. So if your device runs on an Xscale processor, meets all the memory requirements, *and your vendor chooses to release a Cobalt upgrade for your device*, then yes, older palms will be upgradeable.
The zire72 uses Intel’s PXA270 processor, so on that front, it’s upgradeable. So until the PalmOne store carries the upgrade kit for $50 or whatever, all you can do is check the memory requirements and pray to whatever deity you think will help.
It’s very crowded over here, folks. It’s a tough market where there is no obvious supergiant – there are a few major players but none is overwhealmingly bigger than the others. And they’re slogging it out real good.
It’s always interesting to see new players, what is their ace in the sleeve. Some new players try to be competitive by leveraging very cheap labour. Others may try a brand new, well-estabilished software technology from other markets, like PalmOS. And I think they all have a shot at it, really.
Very competitive market, where as of recently, you don’t have to be number one to make a profit.
DUAL BOOT!!!
God damn, release the OS already to we can pop it in a Loox 720.
PalmOS 5 does run natively, the OS itself I mean. The applications are emulated. You can have pieces of your app in ARM native code, but to access OS functions you have to use 68K code. So while PalmOS 6 will keep PACE (the emulation layer) applications can be written in ARM without any of the PalmOS 5 inherited problems like non-global launchcodes, lots of 64k boundaries etc. Of course they won’t be backwards compatible.