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PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux
gandell writes "CNET is reporting that after only two years, PalmOne is spending $30 million dollars to become "Palm" again. From the article:
"PalmOne, which makes handhelds bearing the same name, plans to change its name to Palm later this year, the company said Tuesday.
At that time, its product line, which currently includes the LifeDrive, Treo, Tungsten and Zire devices, will be branded under the Palm name..."
Some will remember that Palm split into two companies, Pa1mOne and Palmsource (which made the Palm OS). According to the article, "...At the time the two companies created a third company, called Palm Trademark Holding, of which PalmSource held a 55 percent stake. That stake will now be transferred to PalmOne for $30 million, the companies said.'" As well, at a recent show Dave Nagel gave notice that Linux is PalmSource's platform for the future.
In the bad old days of the dotcom boom, Palm Pilots were the hottest executive PDA piece of flair out there. And all it really did was manage contacts.
Technology has really made a lot of progress since then and that old Dragonball chip looks like a Hyundai when compared to an XScale Ferrari. The processors can handle much more than the simple PalmOS requests, and in some respects this is a good thing. It means that the underlying OS is relatively light and lots of power can be used to run apps. Unfortunately, that also is a limitation of the OS.
Embedded Linux provides a full operating system with a plethora of drivers and applications. It uses the capabilities of the chipset without being too heavy. It is definitely the way to go.
And actually not just Linux, but any general-purpose embedded OS is the way to go. You'd obviously want something that had guaranteed real-time performance as well as a well-done threading model. The API would need to be very well understood too. This brings up a whole slew of embedded operating systems. It also leaves out PalmOS.