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PalmSource Talks About PalmOS 6.0

Posted by timothy on Thu Oct 31, 2002 12:45 AM
from the bits-n-whistles dept.
stevejsmith writes "The Register has released an article regarding PalmSource speaking about their next OS, PalmOS 6.0. The Register says, 'Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft...', that it will actually include some source code of BeOS, and that will support Microsoft's .NET platform, among other things."
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  • Swappable... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bobulusman (467474) on Thursday October 31 2002, @12:52AM (#4570954)
    Version 6.0 will feature granular, application-level security and pluggable I/O interfaces. Which means that licensees can swap out the Graffiti input mechanism for an alternative,
    That would be welcome upgrade. I know a lot of people dislike it.

    While I like the graffiti on my Visor Deluxe, it would nice if someone could design an interface with all the graffiti symbols that could 'learn' what I mean, the way a speak recognition program does. I have sloppy writing and it's takes me too long to enter in all my assignments.
  • hacks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ramzak2k (596734) on Thursday October 31 2002, @01:18AM (#4570982)
    its nice to read the lines

    Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft, and represents the culmination of work from the former Be team Palm acquired last year.

    get a bunch of talented developers, innovations will follow.

    On the other hand, i am interested to know if 6.0 would have any backward compatibility & run the apps i currently have(NT/OS X had little to no support for apps running on previous versions)
    • Re:hacks by cscx (Score:2) Thursday October 31 2002, @01:20AM
    • Re:hacks by akula1 (Score:1) Thursday October 31 2002, @01:35AM
    • Re:hacks by Twirlip of the Mists (Score:2) Thursday October 31 2002, @05:10AM
    • Re:hacks by tswinzig (Score:2) Thursday October 31 2002, @09:16AM
    • Re:hacks by Tar-Palantir (Score:1) Thursday October 31 2002, @10:34AM
  • PalmOS 6 = good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by itzdandy (183397) <(dandenson) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday October 31 2002, @01:44AM (#4571008) Homepage
    I am looking forward to seeing/getting one of the new Palms with OS6. Handspring has plans for an XScale 600Mhz machine/ATI imageon and 128MB memory for launch with PalmOS6. I currently have a Toshivae740 which i like but WinCE is not my idea of a efficient OS, typical microsoft software, tries to be everything to everyone right out of the box. I like the idea of a "modular" palm6 so i can kill all the crap i dont like without the OS dieing. example=WinCE. If you delete the PocketExcel folder, the damn thing wont boot!

    Palm will most likely have optimized builds for different chips used. the new ARM should have its own build, the old ARM, XScale, etc.

    i have heard rumors that palm6 will also be using by sony in some upcomming set top boxes with 'tivo'like features, and with the BeOS technology we should get a nice smooth and quick interface with great media abilities.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Quite Advanced (Score:2)

    by reitoei1971 (583076) <reitoei@AUDENgmx.net minus poet> on Thursday October 31 2002, @01:55AM (#4571015)
    At what point is this no longer a palm? Or will the next generation simply create a new paradigm for "palm"; the near actualization of the ultra slim pc idea that failed?
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  • no be source (Score:3, Informative)

    by millette (56354) <{millette} {at} {waglo.com}> on Thursday October 31 2002, @02:14AM (#4571028) Homepage Journal
    Steve Sakoman, the team's former leader at Be Inc, and now PalmSource's "chief products officer" has denied that Be code would be incorporated into the new OS. More likely, we suspect, the new OS will inherit some algorithms and architecture from BeOS.
    See, it says right there, _no_ be code in there. But who reads the articles, right?
  • OSX XP? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by octane097 (210723) on Thursday October 31 2002, @02:51AM (#4571043)
    I love how they say "as innovative as OSX to the Mac and NT to the PC" insinuating the "innovation" for Microsoft was when NT came out years ago
    • Re:OSX XP? by Twirlip of the Mists (Score:2) Thursday October 31 2002, @05:14AM
      • Re:OSX XP? by cygnusx (Score:1) Thursday October 31 2002, @09:40AM
        • Re:OSX XP? by Twirlip of the Mists (Score:1) Thursday October 31 2002, @01:06PM
    • Re:OSX XP? by thechink (Score:1) Thursday October 31 2002, @07:44AM
  • by Max Romantschuk (132276) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Thursday October 31 2002, @03:21AM (#4571060) Homepage
    Pieces of BeOS, eh? I wonder if a truly portable mini-studio will finally be possible... I speak from experience when I say that you never know when the inspiration will hit you.

    It'd be great to be able to sample cool sounds on the move and mangle those into even cooler sounds during the bus trip home.

    I'm sure I'd have lot's more good stuff on my home page with a thing like that ;)
  • Sound familiar? (Score:1)

    by Ari_Tibbs (619922) on Thursday October 31 2002, @03:31AM (#4571067)
    "The road to updating PalmOS has been a long one, and the company is halfway to its goal of moving off the 68000 hardware onto ARM, and providing a modern multitasking OS."

    Didn't Apple computer make these claims in the early/mid 90's?
  • by Burb (620144) on Thursday October 31 2002, @04:19AM (#4571091)
    Any idea as to how much of .NET will be supported? I would assume it to be the "Compact Framework" subset?
  • Palm OS 6 - too little, too late? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr_Silver (213637) on Thursday October 31 2002, @05:14AM (#4571131)
    The biggest problem I can see for Palm is that the world and his dog is expecting what OS 6 will deliver today.

    By the time they actually get around to delivering it, the goalposts will have changed (by the likes of Symbian and Microsoft) and Palm will have to play catch up again.

    On a side note, releasing the Tungstun W (phone one) with OS 4 was a monumentally stupid thing to do. If they're going to commit to OS 5, then they should do immediately - not release two new phones with one running the old OS.

    Go to OS 5. Don't look back. Encourage developers to code for OS 5, encourage users who want the power to upgrade. If they're going to release a trickle of OS 4 PDA's then developers will just stick to OS 4.

    Oh yes, and the Tungstun slidely thing is silly. I'm going to have to spend my entire time opening and retracting it as I use grafitti a lot - which means it'll break quickly. We need to see sexy and desirable PDA's come onto the market to persuade people to upgrade. This one doesn't (maybe Sony will) ... and for god's sake, even with the low memory requirements of apps, 32 meg is peanuts! Your apps may be smaller than PPC's, but the size of your data is going to be the same.

    On a final note, I wonder if OS 6 will actually appear. OS 5 could be make-or-break for Palm. If there is no interest (after all, it doesn't *look* any different and thats what Joe Blow will see) then it'll hurt them very very badly.

  • new and improved (Score:3, Insightful)

    by trb (8509) on Thursday October 31 2002, @01:00PM (#4572338)
    If they want to improve the PDA, they should concentrate on the following:
    • easier to read display
    • longer battery life
    • more reliable
    • cheaper
    • faster
    • lighter/thinner
    • more memory
  • by Sandor at the Zoo (98013) on Thursday October 31 2002, @01:26PM (#4572528)
    The article says

    Which means that licensees can swap out the Graffiti input mechanism for an alternative, such as biometrics.

    Wow, so instead of writing characters to input text, I can do it with my fingerprint, retina pattern, heart rate, etc.? That's so cool!

    [For the humor-impaired, that's a joke]

  • by eLoco (459203) on Thursday October 31 2002, @02:21PM (#4573015)

    Anyone know what multilingual capabilities the new OS will have, i.e. character encoding support, fonts, locale-specific formatting, bidi, etc.? As far as encodings go, it would be great to see some Unicode support built in (UTF-8 or UCS-2, depending on available memory and language priorities).

    I know that older versions of the OS were 8-bit (for European languages), which is fine except that you can't mix languages supported by different encoding families (can't build that killer multilingual dictionary for the Palm!).

  • by goondu (601667) on Thursday October 31 2002, @03:39PM (#4573778) Homepage
    "... and after a brief diversion into surrealism bought Be's development staff in August last year."
    developers bought and sold like commodities.
  • All right... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jelle (14827) on Thursday October 31 2002, @04:04PM (#4574014) Homepage
    "and that will support Microsoft's .NET platform, among other things."

    All right... PalmOS 5 it is... (no that is not a typo).

  • by GreenKiwi (221281) on Thursday October 31 2002, @05:15PM (#4574591)
    What would be really awesome is if Palm's new OS wan installable on Windows PocketPC hardware. I'd pay $50-100 to be able to run palm os 6.0 on an iPaq or Tosh 740 with built-in 802.11b.

    It would be even cooler if they could manage to get it to dual boot. But I'd settle for one or the other. This would be great for people who's companies insist that they buy WinCE devices. They could just buy them and then buy PalmOS for it.
  • by treebeard77 (68658) <treebeard AT treebeard DOT net> on Thursday October 31 2002, @05:26PM (#4574656)
    there's an article in the NYTimes's Circuits section today: From Inside, Palm Makes a New Start [nytimes.com] It's an interesting read
  • great idea.. (Score:1)

    by itzdandy (183397) <(dandenson) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday October 31 2002, @06:39PM (#4575067) Homepage
    to be able to install palm6 on one of the current PDAs. I know my e740 will be a bit out of date as far as WinCE machines are concerned, no doubt WinCE4 will require a 1Ghz+ proc and 256MB memory.

    PalmOS6 on the other hand, will still be able to run on more modest hardware. I would hope that a XScale400Mhz wouold be enough.

    and to be ablke to install PalmOS6 onto my e740 and bring it up to current would be great.
  • Uh Oh (Score:1)

    by occamboy (583175) on Thursday October 31 2002, @08:30PM (#4575635)
    I purchased a Palm 1000 the first week that it went on sale, as it seemed to be the first truly-usable PDA.
    Since day 1 I've been using address book, calender, and to some degree the to-do lists and memos. The only other thing that I've ever found to be even vaguely interesting since then is the Zagat restaurant software.
    I've seen a ton of other potential uses for Palms that failed -- for viewing medical records, for example. I suspect that anything small enough to fit in a pocket is too small to do many things with.
    On the other hand, I've seen Microsoft, a very smart and successful company, repeatedly try to top Palm -- only to get killed by overly-complexifying Win CE.
    So I wince whenen I hear that Palm is looking to add complexitity a la Win CE. I hope Palm keeps it simple! If they must add complexity, I hope that the basic things that Palms are good for do not become bloated.
  • Smartphone OS? (Score:1)

    by n2dasun (467303) <n2dasun&yahoo,com> on Thursday October 31 2002, @09:34PM (#4575930) Homepage
    Any chance of getting the Kyocera 7135 [kyocera-wireless.com] upgraded to this before it comes out?
  • Ver.. what? (Score:1)

    by Felinoid (16872) <emot@m-net.arbornet.org> on Friday November 01 2002, @10:03AM (#4578045) Homepage Journal
    I have this rule. When an os relese scedual speeds up get worryed.
    Palm was making major releases once every few years. Thats how in all this time palm os has only gotten to ver 3 then palm releases palm os 4. Well thats about on time. 5 ok major platform change justifyed. 6... ok now we've just dubbled the major version number inside a year.

    I like palm I really do. It's a small business tool. I'm posting to ./ from my visor right now and mom called to tell me her i705 just crashed again.
    But maybe that last example is the point. My Visor's not as trubblesom as her palm.
    And people want movie and mp3 players etc. I don't see the big deal not like the screen on a pocket pc is any bigger.
    I'll stick with my visor for now becouse I can't see myself forking over for a WinCE or Linux PDA just yet.
    There are few who want Windows or Linux on a PDA but then that number is dropping...

    Maybe I'll ger a Dragonix next time.
  • Last Post! (Score:1)

    by alpg (613466) on Thursday November 14 2002, @01:32PM (#4670197) Homepage
    You'd better beat it. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you
    can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.
    -- Groucho Marx

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
  • Re:So does this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pediddle (592795) <pediddle+slashdo ... et minus caffein> on Thursday October 31 2002, @02:55AM (#4571045) Homepage
    Maybe that's all your Palm does, but mine keeps my schedule, composes documents and email, balances my checkbook, keeps track of passwords (encrypted), and, most importantly, plays all sorts of games.

    Lindows has been around for, how long? The hype for Lindows, and other products that don't live up to it, won't last, and such products go away over time. Palm has proven itself by the large number of happy users, even when more "flashy" alternatives are available (WinCE, PocketPC, Clie, iPaq, etc.). Palm 6.0, and for that matter Palm 5.0 (which has not yet been released), are evolutionary.

    If all you can think to put on your Palm is addresses, then maybe it's just something that isn't right for your lifestyle. There isn't a whole lot more truly practical things that any Palm-type device will ever be able to do, although maybe people in your situation will be tempted by multimedia offerings ("Ooh, look, I've got this pretty picture on my little 3-inch screen"). I suppose that the goals of all future Palm releases will mainly center around attracting users such as yourself, who need a look-at-this-cool-gadget-that-plays-songs excuse to justify the cost.

    My point is, if you don't think Palm has already lived up to the hype, then there probably won't be a lot more in the way of everyday, practical, dayplanner-replacement features coming. Maybe you'd be better off with a paper notebook, a gameboy, and a cell phone :-)
    [ Parent ]
  • Re:Get some PRIORITIES! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tsar (536185) on Thursday October 31 2002, @03:07AM (#4571052) Homepage Journal
    "[long list of world's evils, tragedies, scandals & crises], and you people have the gall to be discussing [tech-related news item]????"

    You forgot to mention that Steven King died again today.

    --
    "They've got a cave troll!" -- Boromir [imdb.com]
    [ Parent ]
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