Inside look at the future of Palm OS

[Vincent Nguyen]

BargainPDA was lucky to talk to Chris Dunphy, the Director of Competitive Analysis at PalmSource, about the future of Palm OS and his personal point of view on the point during COMDEX.

The very first question was about the exact release date of Palm OS 6.0 announced earlier this year. Chris said there simply was no official release date, but that licensees are being kept in the loop for developments in the OS and will likely get a copy close to the beginning of the year. You know, new devices usually don’t appear until 4 - 6 months after the OS release and thus Palm doesn’t thing there is any sense in the public announcement of its latest OS version. Never the less, developers will be briefed and updated on the functionality and features of Palm OS 6.0 beforehand. The first developer conference in the U.S to address Palm OS 6.0 is to take place in San Jose, CA February 10-12, 2004. There is also a conference in Beijing, China December 8-9 but it is unlikely Palm OS 6.0 will be addressed there. Apparently, not much news about Palm OS 6 will arrive to us until next February and then the first devices might be released summer of 2004.

Chris is sure that the fact PalmSource gives its licensees the option to alter the OS and goes to great lengths to work closely with its licensees to aid this process is the most important characteristic about PalmSource's Palm OS. For instance, Microsoft does not allow licensees to tweak the Pocket PC OS for a specific device, therefore in the Pocket PC world it's all just a battle of hardware specs and other and it's sometimes really hard to differentiate a device. Dell competes on price while HP competes on hardware innovations such as packing a lot of features into a small form factor. An on the other hand, in the Palm OS world Sony competes both by adding cool features into the OS such as multimedia advancements and also coming up with innovative form factors.

The interviewee doesn’t take too serious to the latest mobile gadgets such as Nokia N-Gauge and considers it to be just a 'game taco' lacking some substantial features.

As for smartphones, Chris believes that Palm has the will beat its competitors with the release of Palm OS 5 for low-end smartphones in 1st Quarter 2004. These will be pretty powerful devices for a reasonable price. Besides, Palm is not a new guy at all with its very successful Treo series and upcoming Palm OS smartphones from Samsung. He thinks the new Motorola MPX-200 Windows Smartphone device is somewhat uninteresting because it lacks a camera and Bluetooth but is intrigued by the SPV e200 slated to arrive in the U.S. soon

By the way, Chris showed an interesting smartphone named XPlore G18 assembled by GS Technologies in Hong Kong. This converged device runs Palm OS 4.1.2 and enables you to run all standard software for this operation system. It has a 16-bit TFT screen and 16 MB of RAM and supports GSM 900/1800, GPRS Class 10, SMS/MMS messaging and other cool features.

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Courtesy of www.PDALive.com