“PalmSource has offered us a glimpse of the next milestone for PalmOS, version 6.0 due for release next year. Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft, and represents the culmination of work from the former Be team Palm acquired last year.” Read the report at TheRegister.
PalmOS 6 Details Emerge
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
What the compatability will be with current palms. I was wanted to wait for this release before I got my palm last year, but just got too impatient. If it doesn’t run on my 505, i’m gonna be kicking my self in the A**.
Well current palm’s (based on dragonball) would be too slow to run that kind of things…
Palm company just buy BeOS to kill it? I still don’t get it why Palm buy BeOS and still haven’t use it. Unless, I am blind, missing or something else.
Because BeOS does not always scale in such things. Even BeIA was not scaling in such small devices.
It is well known (just read the SEC filing/contract) that Palm bought Be’s IP for the engineers and their experience/knowledge that they can use for PalmOS 6, and not directly for the BeOS.
They didn’t just buy BeOS; they bought the Be team of engineers. Also ideas from BeOS could have been/could be used without actually using BeOS.
Yeah it’s really sad. I don’t understand why Palm wouldn’t atleast do SOMETHING with BeOS. Even if it’s not making it run on a hand held. I mean, why not just release the source? It’s not doing any good for them just sitting there. Do they offer to license the source? Maybe if they would license the source cheaply they could make money and give the community something it badly wants/needs. Just my $0.000000002
>I mean, why not just release the source?
Because BeOS includes some third party proprierty code that can’t be opened.
>Do they offer to license the source?
For $2 million, yes (according to the last person who asked for it). (according to the SEC papers, they bought the whole Be softare for only $800,000, the rest 10 million was for the engineers)
“It is well known (just read the SEC filing/contract) that Palm bought Be’s IP for the engineers and their experience/knowledge that they can use for PalmOS 6, and not directly for the BeOS.”
SEC filings leave a lot of room for imagination. Just read worldcom’s or enron’s sometime. SEC filings really just require that you not lie enough to get caught.
Palm purchased be to enable the engineers that came along for the ride to freely apply what they learned at be and probably even some select code from beos without riksing a nasty little lawsuit from Be’s disgruntled investors. It was a package that included both engineers and technology. Palm is full of it and it seems like plenty of people want to help them spread the message as unbelievable as it is.
Palm was up the creek without a paddle. That purchase may have saved the company. Still, i doubt you’ll ever see beos from them. They have to or at least want to focus on the handheld market. At some point, perhaps we’ll see a palm OS 6 notebook but don’t hold your breathe, and i doubt that palm will ever release a normal desktop solutions. It would be better to attack the desktop by improving the capabilities of handhelds/notebooks and palm os 6. Beos will never see the light of day….ever…..ever again unless beunited succeeds.
Palm just release PalmOS 5. This is already a major version that accept ARM proc. and need to rewrite apps (but a emulator exist for old apps OS 3 & 4). If they change again API (.NET compatible) for OS 6, they will kill the dev for OS 5…
Don’t understand their strategy !
yc, you on holiday or something? 10 posts and you still haven’t responded with your trademark Optimism. You must be overjoyed, since Palm are releasing OS6, aka BeOS R6.
>>Palm was up the creek without a paddle.
>>That purchase may have saved the company.
I am agree 100%. Considering the current market with PocketPC and Symbian, I truly believe that Palm would have died without Be Inc’s IPs.
>>Still, i doubt you’ll ever see beos from them.
I disagree. I believe they will do it when the time is right. I believe the OS Market will open up some day soon.
There day will come when companies like HP/Compaq, Dell, Gateway, IBM, Toshiba, Acer, Hitachi and others can freely ship their PCs with which ever OS an end user wishes to have on it. That’s when we will see BeOS resurface like a Phoenix! At that time security technologies from the PalmOS 5/6 will find their way into BeOS & BeIA.
I am willing to bet that Apple will license PalmOS 6 to build a PDA and/or offer licensees it’s Newton Handwriting technology as an input module for PalmOS 6. It just makes sense. I just hope they don’t buy PalmSource.
ciao
yc
“I disagree. I believe they will do it when the time is right. I believe the OS Market will open up some day soon”
I hope you are right and i am wrong but palmsource is so small. It seems as though it would be very difficult for them to target the desktop.
I would like to get a new handheld one day, but my recently upgraded Palm Pilot Personal (upped to a Palm III) will have to do until there is a relatively inexpensive, color, Palm OS 6 or later device available. I don’t see any reason to buy any of the existing OS 5 or earlier devices at this time. I’m more interested in the results of the BeOS-developer/mentality absorption 🙂
Funny thing is that these Palm and WinCE devices are only just now eclipsing the Newton 2100’s abilities… I will never understand why Steve killed that product. What a moron.
Good news, though. Thanks for posting it, Eugenia.
Well, looking at the screenshots of OS 5, it seems that they at least have adopted the isometric style BeOS icons, which is nice!
Anybody have any PalmOS 5.0 screenshots?
I saw 3-4 on http://images.google.com/ Search for “palmos 5”.
>Well, looking at the screenshots of OS 5, it seems that >they at least have adopted the isometric style BeOS icons, >which is nice!
Sorry, I reread my comment – what I meant was that the icons are in an isometric style, like the BeOS icons were also isometric style.
You can see one picture here…
http://www.infosync.no/news/2002/n/2496,4.html
<optimism>
You know, the tone of the article alone brings back some of the BeOS excitement.
One thing we have to realize is that as PalmSource develops PalmOS 6 with BeOS multimedia and graphics framework, as they adds super cool stuff like application level security and .Net compatibility, they are in actuality working on BeOS as well. BeOS can certainly use the application level security and .Net compatibility stuff for example. Remember all the XML stuff in DANO? Well .Net uses XML! I think PalmSource is being very, very smart about this. I think they are “hedging” their OS bet and doing it extremely well.
We must also realize that the future of BeOS depends almost exclusively on the success of PalmOS 5/6. A few more licensees like Sony would be nice! The only other option is that someone else could license the code and not keep up with the very high standards of the original creators of the OS (that would be bad).
Remember Gassee’s last attempt to keep Be Inc afloat? He tried to make money in IAs in hope of returning to desktops later as the desktop market was just impenetrable. Well, guess what, they now have a golden opportunity to successfully do just that with the PalmOS and that’s exactly what they are going for.
I think this is just the beginning of things to come folks. BeOS is so alive and well that I would not be surprised if a BeOS derived desktop came shortly after the PalmOS 6.
Go Palm! Go! Go! Go!
</optimism>
I still prefer the Qtopia, Gpe or Opie look …
See http://opie.handhelds.org/screenshots/gallery/ and
http://gpe.handhelds.org/screenshots.shtml
All of these can run on my iPAQ (that uses StrongARM processor) now. Wait for what to have a decent operating system on PDA ?
That’s a suprise.
IIRC, OS 5 is source compatible with OS 4. .NET support, if like Java support is just a runtime engine. Want to run a .NET app? Run it. Want to run a native app? No problem there. Think Mac OS X with Cocoa AND Java.
Of course, you and me wouldn’t know, but it is extremely unlikely that Palm would kill the only advantage it has over Pocket PC.
yc: Remember Gassee’s last attempt to keep Be Inc afloat? He tried to make money in IAs in hope of returning to desktops later as the desktop market was just impenetrable.
The desktop market wasn’t impenetrable. The fact is to enter the desktop market, you have to be good in marketing. And the fact was Be was never good in that. Be decided to get into the IA business because they, and many analysis, plus Intel and Microsoft predicted that Internet powered devices would replace desktops. Guess what? They didn’t.
Opie and GPE both require massive amounts of memory compared to what PalmOS needs, and probably would be hard to scale to other form factors, like cell phones or set top boxes.
I’ve been developing a possible alternative to these, PicoGUI. It should be scalable to nearly any platform including extremes like OpenGL acceleration on the desktop, cell phones with only a small screen and numpad, or even text-only terminals.
And if you’re in it for the looks, it can be made to look much better than Opie IMHO
“The desktop market wasn’t impenetrable. The fact is to enter the desktop market, you have to be good in marketing. And the fact was Be was never good in that”
Yeah right! dream on. Even apple, with its billions in adverstising has only 5% market share. the only way to address x86 is through open source or in other words by not being a business.
Starting out with an entirely new processor and board wouldn’t do it either.
Well, marketing could always have been better, for any corporation during any period of time. However, Microsoft did and still does have serious illegal barriers to entry in the OS market.
Check this out:
http://www.beincorporated.com/msft_complaint.pdf
ciao
yc
“The desktop market wasn’t impenetrable. The fact is to enter the desktop market, you have to be good in marketing. And the fact was Be was never good in that”
I’ll also add that you really can’t say that be’s marketing sucked because you have no idea what would have happened if those OEMs (like dell, hitachi, and others) had been able to install or at least offer beos on their machines without interference from MS. Be, inc. got to those companies and probably could have had beos preinstalled for all we know if it had not been for MS. And to get your OS preintalled in a major OEM, or at least to have their interest, demonstrates good marketing. You are mistaking marketing for altneratives. be didn’t have that many of the latter.
In addition, have you noticed that there is not a single commercially successful desktop os other than windows and mac OS. None. Sure linux has some bits and pieces on the desktop but the share is very very low and open source need not play by the rules of economics 101 because they have free labor.
Why is that. Why are there no other commercially successful desktop OS? Why? Very simply because the barrier to entry in that market is too high or maybe its because (if we follow your logic) every other single company in the world, except MS and apple, has bad marketing and so no one can touch MS and apple. . The only way to do address the desktop is through open source, not a business, or by expanding the capabilities of some other platform, say like a play station of symbian smart phone. That might change if MS’s monopoly nonesense is roped in.
ryan: Yeah right! dream on. Even apple, with its billions in adverstising has only 5% market share. the only way to address x86 is through open source or in other words by not being a business.
Apple is a profitable niche player, something Be should have aim to be in the beginning. The main reason why Apple’s market share is shrinking is because its hardware is sold with a huge premium. Fortunately, Apple have a profitable niche, with paying customers. In other words, they reap more profit.
Apple couldn’t care less about dominating the market place now, unlike Be. What they care is *profit*, something Be never had.
yc: Well, marketing could always have been better, for any corporation during any period of time. However, Microsoft did and still does have serious illegal barriers to entry in the OS market.
Notice where your link came from. 🙂
The so-called illegal barriers didn’t prevent Apple from reaping a profit, no? It all comes down to marketing. Be spends its money on cloning Quicktime, while there isn’t a good web browsing experience on Be OS (something more important, IMHO). It has no clear target market other than “multimedia”. Heck, the OEM deals didn’t even set a minimum limit on how many machines that should bundle Be OS!
The reason why Be OS couldn’t be bundled together with Windows on the same machine is Microsoft’s own choice. They have that rule from the beginning. It isn’t a condition they made up to get rid of Be. And why did no OEM didn’t bundle BeOS-only? Because for crying out loud, it was unprofitable.
Windows OEM comes at a price around $20-$50, depending on your sales volume. Just to have a machine $40 lower than a Windows machine wouldn’t prompt users to buy it especially since there is practically nothing a consumer could do with it.
ryan: I’ll also add that you really can’t say that be’s marketing sucked because you have no idea what would have happened if those OEMs (like dell, hitachi, and others) had been able to install or at least offer beos on their machines without interference from MS.
That’s not marketing. That’s selling. Pick up a book on marketing and talk to me after reading it. Marketing isn’t where you build a product and then find ways to sell it. Marketing is where from the early design stages you design a product for your target market.
Besides, Be took the OEM method as a shortcut in getting marketshare and therefore ISV support. But with Be OS 5 needing royalties for developing apps, plus the fact that all sane ISV would know users don’t use Be OS, it just come bundled with their machines – they would still be unsuccessful. Be would be making a loss on each machine sold.
ryan: In addition, have you noticed that there is not a single commercially successful desktop os other than windows and mac OS.
Wrong, Commodore and Amiga was successful. The only reason they died was the same reason Enron is dead. Besides, Windows and Mac OS is commercially successful because of good marketing. OS/2 had a chance if IBM wasn’t so shortsighted and greddy.
ryan: None. Sure linux has some bits and pieces on the desktop but the share is very very low and open source need not play by the rules of economics 101 because they have free labor.
Linux market share is remarkably high, and its growth rate is the fastest in the market. 2% is small, but that just represents the amount of SALES. If one would be able to count the amount of installations of Linux (which would be impossible, the market share would be WAY higher. Plus the fact that 2% represents a huge number of users.
It is successful on the marketplace, but in terms of profit – it is quite hard to make a profit from something free, no?
Very simply because the barrier to entry in that market is too high or maybe its because (if we follow your logic) every other single company in the world, except MS and apple, has bad marketing and so no one can touch MS and apple. .
You got it both right. The barriers are high not because Microsoft prevents anyone from using a altenative OS by drafting up laws and pushing them at Congress and the EU parliment. It is because of its market share, it requires a lot of patience and good marketing skills to penetrate the market. It is NOT impossible.
So tell me, since you are SO good in marketing, what market was Be targeting? Even Microsoft have more clearer target markets (e.g. Xp home is for the consumer, XP Pro is for the corporate market, XP MCE is for the consumer/TV market, XP Tablet PC is for the mobile corporate market, etc). Don’t even dare to say “desktop” or “multimedia”.