Palm OS Apps on Linux Mobile Phones

An anonymous reader writes "PalmSource revealed details of its Linux-based mobile phone operating system, Tuesday at 3GSM in Barcelona. Codenamed ALP (Access Linux Platform), the architecture supports Palm OS application binaries, Java apps, and native Linux apps. ALP includes a 68K emulation layer capable of running 'properly written' Palm 68K or 'Garnet' application binaries without modification, PalmSource claims. However, devices based on ALP are not expected until next year -- will it be too late for PalmSource and it's parent company ACCESS to gain a foothold in the mobile phone market?"

Comments

Re:Linux, Apple, Palm Emulator

[Eugenia Loli]

You have a few things messed up. The rumors was for a purchase of Palm, not PalmSource/Access (which this news item is about). These are two completely different companies now.

Gain a foothold?

[Andy Dodd]

Given that Palm Inc. is one of PalmSource's largest licensees, I would say that PalmSource already has a pretty big foothold in the mobile market.

The Treo 600 was pretty popular, the Treo 650 is incredibly popular (and is getting huge amounts of product placement in TV shows and movies - even teenagers are packing 650s in Smallville! :) ), and while the initial release of the Verizon Treo 700w is Windows Mobile based, there are lots of rumors with some substantiation that a Sprint Treo 700p is under development. The Treo 750 may likely be using this new Linux-based PalmOS version.

BTW, a Linux-based PalmOS isn't exactly new news - it's been known for quite a while that the next generation of PalmOS was going to be based on Linux.

Re:why not years ago?

[TheRaven64]

When palm started out they were using those horribly underpowered Dragonball CPUs from Motorola. This was a cut-down 68K chip, with no MMU which ran at between 16 and 33MHz, giving a staggering 3MIPS. The lack of an MMU alone meant that they couldn't go with any Free POSIX-like OS available at the time. The lack of power made it even more certain. They could probably have licensed something like QNX, but then they would have been dependant on a third party for their OS.

Don't forget, the first Palms were released in 1996. Back then, desktop CPUs were past the 100MHz mark and pushing past one instruction per clock. The DragonBall, in comparison, had less power than a MicroVAX and, while you can run NetBSD on a MicroVAX, you really don't want to - and you'd want to even less if you had to re-write the VM subsystem to work without an MMU.

The original PalmOS was designed for a platform where features were far less important than battery life. Shoehorning a full UNIX-like OS in would have required a lot more resources, which would have driven the cost up and the battery life down - exactly the opposite of what was required.

Re:why not years ago?

[tlhIngan]

When palm started out they were using those horribly underpowered Dragonball CPUs from Motorola. This was a cut-down 68K chip, with no MMU which ran at between 16 and 33MHz, giving a staggering 3MIPS. The lack of an MMU alone meant that they couldn't go with any Free POSIX-like OS available at the time. The lack of power made it even more certain. They could probably have licensed something like QNX, but then they would have been dependant on a third party for their OS.

Actually, PalmOS was designed to handle the "underpowered" DragonBall - despite only running at 16MHz, it still managed a respectable speed (instant on, extremely fast app-switching). Not only that, but by using a really underpowered CPU, they could squeeze a month's worth of battery life out of 2 AAA batteries (!). PalmOS was designed around its hardware limitations to offer acceptable to superior performance, compared to OSes with far superior processors (PocketPC was usable once it started using 133MHz and faster CPUs. They didn't tend to use regular batteries.).

And the main core kernel actually is licensed - they use the Kadak AMX kernel. Unfortunately, one of the problems with the kernel was although it was multithreaded (PalmOS *is* multithreaded), Palm could not expose any APIs that created any threads. Thus, you have your single-process multi-threaded OS (the original palmOS ran on 3 threads - the main application thread, a serial port thread, and one thread reserved for the Find operation. The serial port thread heandles all the serial communications (hotsync, modem, etc), while the find thread handles doing application searches.

Re:why not years ago?

[isaac]

They could probably have licensed something like QNX, but then they would have been dependant on a third party for their OS.

They did. Palm OS used the AMX kernel from Kadak.

-Isaac