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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."
I'm sure glad they recently discovered three more elements! Now Palm can make three more versions of their OS.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Not Mac compatible (synch wise), I heard.
Highlights are a 32,000x32,000 screen support
So when will I be seeing gigapixel screens in other devices?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
...existing Tungstens will be able to upgrade. Probably not, but they've done it before with OS 5...here's hoping.
Honest question: Is there any design that you can think of that doesn't result in a bulky cell phone/palm, or an impossibly small screen, with no stylus? I'd love to use this. But I don't want to feel like I have a mini-computer as a phone.
Joe
Finally, I can use my uber wall of flat panels monitors with my PDA!
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".
With support for up to 256MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM...
I suppose this is a lot for a Palm, but what's the imitation? Address space/overhead? Nowadays you can fit a gig into an area that the first Palms fit 512K into, so size isn't an issue... voltage/battery life might be a consideration, but probably not a showstopper.
Eh, I suppose the design of the Palm is really not meant to handle things requiring that much memory. But guys at work are cramming 512meg memory cards on their iPaqs and watching movies; does the 256MB limitation in the OS mean that "external memory" cannot exceed that amount as well?
the info on that is vague.... it's possible Apple will make it work straight through with iSync. Hopefully they will, and add some way to upload Palm OS apps? Maybe Palm desktop is not worth them working on when iCal and Addressbook are on every Mac now running OS X (unless the user deletes them).
I know these are pretty ubiquitous among business users and those who can afford them, but are they really that useful to the terminally broke? What functionality does a PDA offer that makes it worth the price tag to someone who is making something in the neighborhood of 20k a year? I'd love to play with one, but I just don't know what I'd do with it, apart from hold my phone numbers. My cell already does that. Anyone?
-1, "1337" speak
It's for porn. Horray for microscopicaly small boobies!!!
Why would they build it off the Linux kernel when they already own BeOS? Yeah, I'd say that's a rumor alright.
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
SO they have added some BeOS functionality to this thing. I owned a Palm. I thought it was brilliant, but as i saw the prices of PDA's drop and the Palm price stay the same for less features, it didnt seem like such a good buy anymore. I wonder what they will charge for this. I think the resolution is a bit of overkill. I'm not gonna hook this thing up to a television to play Galaga on an emulator. My Zaurus does all the things this thing can and probably a hell of a lot more. The tungsten's werent too impressive, this one doesnt seem to be either. And why dont they gave us the names of the "industry leaders".
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:
they better be able to support more than 256Mb of ram, since you'll need at least a Gb to represent that 32kX32K screen.
free online diet tracking.
there are some interesting discussions at the bottom of the page regarding the naming of "Palm OS Cobalt" instead of "Palm OS 6".
the CCO's reply was "As for the naming, numbers were a problem because in the PC world a higher number means the lower number is obsolete (Windows 98 immediately replaces Windows 95). Palm OS Garnet is just fine for many users and will persist a long time, so licensees asked us to move away from numbers."
so maybe the naming also implies the confidence in a product? the company sees no need for users to UPgrade unnecessarily in the future. eg Mandrake Almighty instead of Mandrake 1241.12.102
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
As a Mac user, extremely disappointed that Palm has decided to completely nix the Mac market with OS 6, I'd now seriously consider a linux based PDA. If I'm forced to buy a PDA that doesn't support the Mac out of the box I'd rather give my money to a company supporting open-source. The Sharp Zaurus line is appealing, but the last I heard there was no syncing solution at all for the Mac, even from 3rd party's. Has this situation changed yet?
--- What?
Is it me, or does there seem to be an overabundance of old CPU's floating around out there? I'm sitting on at least 6 pentium 1 class CPU's here in my garage with speeds varying from 75-200mhz.
Looking at these old CPU relics, I remember how nice BeOS ran on the machines of the time. PalmOS=(PalmOS + some BeOS IP)
I think it would be a neat idea if someone made an affordable, upgradable, palm like device that could use these old CPU's. I mean, I know there must be millions of these things being used in less usefull roles, such as doorstops and monitor stands. It's a shame that all these pentium CPU's have more or less been "retired" or tossed into a landfill.
Sure a p-200 isn't that powerful of a CPU by todays standards of P4's and Athlons, but they have enough power to decode mp3's, compose e-mail, and surf the web.
I don't think it would be that expensive either to build a socketed palm device. Sure it would be a bit bulkier than new palms, but for small form factor geeks or just guys like me that have 30 years of computer crap in his garage it would be a godsend. Something the size and dimensions of a 3.5" hard drive only slightly thicker would be perfect.
Now go ahead and tell me about pc-104 devices, blah blah... Yes I know they exist, but they're not a single integrated device in sleek packaging.
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.
Well, they may be able to address 32000 x 32000 pixels (actually, I'll bet it's 32768 x 32768), but good luck getting it to actually drive that big of a screen. At 256 megs of maximum memory, you'd need 31 palms just to store that much screen real estate in memory.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
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.
I know third party hardware existed to allow powerpoint slides (no motion or sound) be carried and transmitted from a palmpilot.. this may have built in vga output for road warriors.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Hmmm... "microscopically small" isn't usually what I'm looking for in porn star breasts.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
"Man, that's a pretty high resolution for such a tiny screen."
That's a pretty high resolution for a sheet of paper.
Or are they just forward thinking? I wouldn't be totally insane if I predicted that display resolution will take a radical turn much in the same way that RAM and HD storage did in the not too distant future. I think we're all looking forward to 1200 dpi monitors. Microsoft's already pushing in that direction. Longhorn's UI is vector based with the idea that you can scale it up to really high resolutions and still maintain the same proportions. The image just gets clearer, as opposed to getting smaller. It has even been reported that MS is working with an LCD manufacturer (I want to say Viewsonic, but I'll just have to come forward and say I don't remember too clearly which company was mentioned) to develop displays that ran up to at least 5,000 pixels wide. That's almost 300 dpi on a 19" monitor. Crank that up to 1200 dpi and you almost arrive at that 32k number.
Does it still seem excessive on a Palm sized display? Sure. Given how the numbers work in the computing world, the next digit down was probably a little too close to what is practical in the next 2-3 years. Better to be safe?
"Derp de derp."
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
If I remember correctly it's 1 arcminute, which is 1/60th of a degree if I remember right. This is at the center of your eye, where things are the most clear (and it degrades from there, toward your peripheral vision)
Whoever said "Think Angular" is right.
What this means is that it depends on distance. The farther you are for something, the less resolution it has. Try it -- have someone hold a ruler and walk away from it... pretty soon, you can't see the lines of demarcation. Yet up close, they are quite clear.
I played around with these numbers with a friend of mine for a whole class period once. It worked fairly well. Best way to re-figure these numbers is to assume a straight line out of the eye of length "l", and some height, "h", where the angle inside the eye from the top to bottom of H (along the triangle is 1/2 an arcminute (1/120 degree). So, therefore...
tan (1/120 degrees) = h/l (and l is given, find h)
h = l * tan(1/120)
2h = one dot. 1/(2h) = dots per unit of h. proper unit conversions then apply.
so, at 1 foot (12 inches)
h = 12 in. * tan(1/120)
h = 0.00175
2h = 0.0035
1/2h = 286
thus, at 1 foot, the eye has (at it's center) close to 286 DPI.
More than you cared to know, I'm sure. Interesting nonetheless.
(Sorry about the English units. I guess I'm just being an insensitive clod.)
Barak Michener
Specifically, the article says "The new graphics system is designed to support screen sizes up to 32,000 by 32,000 pixels!" (emphasis added).
All they are saying is that the software is less limited in what resolutions are supported, not that they expect the device to actually have a screen that size.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
I don't know where this stuff about lack of Mac support is coming from. I'm here at the PalmONE conference and everyone is going out of their way to say that there is/will be mac support at every opportunity.
While currently there are few gaps in the mac developer tools, they seem comitted to remedying this situation. It's eclipse based, but the resource editor and simulator are windows only. They talked about moving the resource editor into eclipse, but I don't see the simulator getting ported any time soon.
It's also worth remembering that it's going to be some time before there is going to be any Cobalt (OS 6) devices on the shelves, so it's a little premature to complain about hotsync when there's no hardware.
On the whole, Cobalt looks awsome. The demos of the multi-media capabilities are fantastic. This is a proper growed-up operating system that bests anything else on the market for the forseeable future.
I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the new OS, but I'm totally won over now.
The transition is going to suck a little for developers, but they've put a great deal of effort into making it as easy as it can reasonably be.