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Details Of Palm OS 6 - 'Cobalt'
Splezunk writes "Looks like Palm has finally released some details on Palm OS 6 a k a 'Cobalt'. Palminfocenter has more on it, and I have just noticed that there are now screenshots. Highlights are a 32,000x32,000 screen support, BeOS like multitasking and threading. Currently 256MB memory, but this will be upgraded in time."
Not Mac compatible (synch wise), I heard.
Oh, and I also didn't see any screenshots anywhere. Could someone direct me to them.
Think in bytes. Or words at least. You can't always have anything in between.
Think about the colors.. 16.. 256 - there's no such thing as "120 color support".
PalmSource today introduced Palm OS Cobalt, previously know as Palm OS 6. Cobalt is a new enhanced version of the operating system that is designed to enable the creation of new categories of devices for the communications, enterprise, education and entertainment markets. PalmSource also announced Palm OS Garnet, an enhanced version of the popular Palm OS 5, designed to accelerate the development of Palm Powered handhelds and smartphones.
"We believe Palm OS Cobalt will pave the way for new categories of smart mobile devices and solutions, for the communications, enterprise, education and entertainment markets," said David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, Inc. "We have also reinforced our commitment to optimize our platform for wireless devices, by including wireless capabilities in both Palm OS Cobalt and Palm OS Garnet, designed to enable a wide range of smartphones and other wireless products."
Formerly known as Palm OS 6, Palm OS Cobalt is a complete rewrite of Palm OS designed to maintain ease of use and software compatibility while creating a foundation for next-generation Palm Powered devices and solutions tailored to the growing needs of the communications, enterprise, education and entertainment markets. Palm OS Cobalt improves compatibility with Microsoft Windows, while offering advanced features including:
Multitasking, multithreading;
Memory protection;
Support for more memory and larger screens;
Industry standards-based security;
Extensible communication and multimedia frameworks capable of handling multiple connections simultaneously;
In addition, Palm OS Cobalt provides rich graphics and multimedia features derived from the Be OS, which Palm(R), Inc. acquired in 2001.
Also announced today, Palm OS Garnet builds on the solid foundation of Palm OS 5 and incorporates new built-in technical features such as standard support for a broad range of screen resolutions, dynamic input area, improved network communication, and Bluetooth. Palm OS Garnet is designed to enable licensees to more efficiently bring Palm Powered handhelds and smartphones to market and reduce development costs.
New Software Development Tools
PalmSource also introduced new software development tools for Palm OS Cobalt and Palm OS Garnet. A technical preview of the new Palm OS Developer Suite is now available to Palm OS developers in the Resource Pavilion in the Developer Zone. The new Palm OS Developer Suite is based on the industry-standard Eclipse environment, an open-source, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) originally developed by IBM that supports software development in a variety of languages, including C, C++, Java and COBOL. The Palm OS Developer Suite provides one set of tools designed to assist Palm OS developers to create and bring to market higher performance wireless, entertainment and enterprise-grade applications that take advantage of the advanced functionality of Palm Powered smart mobile devices. PalmSource and its partners now offer a wide variety of development tools, including Metrowerks CodeWarrior, the Eclipse environment, Borland's tool suite and the Microsoft NET compatible tools from AppForge.
More About Palm OS Cobalt
Multithreaded, Multitasking -- Palm OS Cobalt is designed to enable multiple applications to run simultaneously, so users gain more productivity and a better user experience. For example, a user can listen to MP3 files, book a calendar appointment and take an incoming phone call. A background-processing model is designed to reduce most memory problems commonly associated with multitasking in mobile devices.
Expanded, Protected Memory Architecture -- With support for up to 256MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM, Palm OS Cobalt paves the way for the creation of more sophisticated communications, enterprise, education and entertainment applications. In addition, the new protected memory architecture is designed to protect against applications "hanging" the system or causing crashes.
System Wide Security Archit
If you read the article properly, You would of noticed that it supports *upto* a 32000x32000, it dosent actually have one. So if you had actually had a 32000x32000 screen somewhere, it would work. If you looked at the Actual screenshots, it is only doing 320x480!
found here
There is an article on what Cobalt lacks...
Macrumors posted this toot hough:
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
I saw this at the bottom of the article. NVIDIA is going to enhance the graphics for devices using Cobalt and Garnet. They're going to "bring advanced multimedia support to the OS". I thought it was pretty cool; although it makes my PDA sound so old and boring.
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
Actually, the only way that iSync works with palms is if you have Palm software installed. When you install it, it installs Palm Desktop (the PIM software), the HotSync application, support libraries, and conduits.
The iSync for Palm basically removes the Palm Desktop conduits and adds a conduit to sync with iSync.
In order to use iSync with the Sony Clie, one of which I have, you must have Palm Desktop, Missing Sync for Clie, iCal, and the iSync for Palm installed.
Missing Sync provides the Palm HotSync communication, iSync for Palm provides HotSync iCal/Address Book.
iSync alone won't touch Palms, so it is highly unlikely that Apple will be able to bypass Palm Desktop/Hotsync completely.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
I have seen people cram a DVD (reformated into the screen dimensions) on an SD Card. Works great. I have my MP3's on there too. Not bad for a phone!
You know the sad part is, its not much easier for Palms (or Pocket PCs even!) connected to windows. Depending on your email client and other software on your PC the setup gets just as convoluted as you have mentioned.
Here are the screenshots. But better open them in a different window 'Slashdot User!'
The "Chief Competitive Officer" posted to Palminfocenter on this:
Desktop CPUs were never designed with low power consumption in mind. You'd probably need to lug around a 10lb battery unit to have any sort of reasonable usage time in such a thing.
Besides, a dragonball cpu is probably cheaper than a ZIF socket these days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You don't need Missing Sync. Just download Apple's iSync 1.2 Palm Conduit. Combined with Palm Desktop, it works great with my Clie PEG-SJ20. Clie, Palm, whatever--the only difference, as far as the desktop machine is concerned, is the logo on the front.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The 32k x 32k represents addressable pixels. You could manipulate such a screen directly, or through a framebuffer built into the display block. No need to do it in RAM.
Though of course no Palm will have such a display.
It's simply got two 16 bit words to represent an X/Y coordinate. (15 bits + 1 for something else?) Nothing magical there.
8 bit would have left it at 256x256 max, anything between is silly given conventional device design.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Of course, with that said, if I have Chapura Keysite style syncing between my Palm and Entourage on the Mac, I would get rid of windows forever. Oh well.
It can be done. I really like the size and feel of this Samsung i500 PalmOS phone.
There are about 6-8 million color sensing neurons in the eye, and about 120 million brightness sensing neurons.
I don't know how many discrete imaging elements are in the eye itself, but it hardly matters because the eye moves (involuntarily) to make a smooth image out of a number of samples, or more to the point, a certain sampling duration.
Where did you hear this? That isn't how the eye works at all. You can test this yourself by writing a program to flash a word on the screen for a short amount of time. (like a 30th or 60th of a second. You should still be able to read it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Unfortunately, it is on Yahoo, so if anyone else has a better place to mirror, it would be appreciated.
Screenshots
Man, this would be insightful if what you were claiming was a boundary power of two. Unfortunately for you, that's 2^15, not 2^16, and the whole-screen resolution is 2^30, not 2^32.
I think the real issue here is that someone at Palm said "hey, let's not impose stupid limits on the platform for five generations from now" and everyone went "What? i can't count that high. That am be dumm. Let's guess why! It's got to be... uh... about... uh... the *machine*. Yeah."
Of course, the astute notice that 32,000 isn't 32k, that a word isn't nessecarily (soon even frequently) 32 bits, and that colors don't always come nearly packaged in machine-sized powers of two.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Well, BeOS is kind of long in the tooth. If you look around the embedded Linux world, you might be able to find that one of the companies is under contract to palm.
You can get Qtopia Desktop from Trolltech but it is not compatible with Sharp's "new" and incompatible syncing stuff. It is possible to sync with an "older" zaurus (it's the ROM that matters, not the hardware). It should be possible to setup OpenZaurus/Opie and be able to sync with Trolltech's Qtopia Desktop if you've got a "new" zaurus and you can't put an older ROM on it.
There is a USB driver somewhere that you'll need to connect your Zaurus to a Mac.
I've synchronized an A300 (older model zaurus only sold in Japan) and a SL5000D (really old "developer only" zaurus) with a Mac.
Link
The older Palms aren't powerful enough for multimedia, but they're surprisingly useful if you happen to find the right apps. Things like Pocket Quicken to organize your finances, IP subnet calculators, offline web browsers like Avantgo and Plucker (I prefer Plucker myself, it's Free and Avantgo needs registration). You can read ebooks too, but the 160x160 screen is hard on the eyes. The PocketPCs and newer Palms have at least a 320x240 screen. Of course ebooks can mean a lot of different things, like novels to read on a long plane ride, reference books, or Linux HOWTOs. $50 to $80 for one of these is still a non-trivial amount for a starving student, but it's in the realm of affordability.
Where is it? It's on the CDs they passed out here at the PalmSource conference yesterday.
At a guess, the future versions of the dev environment might be available on the "seeding" area of the Palm developer's web site.
Also, they are currently at version 0.1 of the IDE. They say they'll release 0.1.1 (bug fixes) in a week or so, and the 1.0 is coming in a few months. The one they have now is really a "technology preview" release and is not ready for prime time, or at least that's the word I've heard. So they may wait until they have something more stable and release that.
Palm OS already is already multitasking and has been this way since the first Palm OS. The original OS was built upon the AMX embedded kernel, which has preemptive multithreading, however the more recent Palm OS's are based on Palm's own multitasking kernel. The real problem is that the user events are only handled in the "UI Thread" so all GUI driven applications must run in that single thread.
I own a Palm and use it a lot.... telephone directory, address list (a must for xmas cards), calendar, computer inventory at work, and the occasional game to keep me entertained when in a queue. The resident physician staff at the office use theirs to keep track of their procedural experience which must be reported as part of their training. The Palm fits nicely in their breast pocket, is easy to use, and is jolly-on-the-spot when needed.
Of course, I will admit to being forced to use one and that it took a long time to adjust to the non-paper method. Now I wouldn't trade it for the world.