.FLYINGHEAD INDUSTRY INSIDER
.TITLE PalmSource clarifies our coverage of Palm OS and ALP
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY Over the past few weeks, we’ve been covering the changes in the Palm OS and its apparent eventual migration into something called ALP. As is always the case when trying to understand something new and relatively poorly documented, we got some of our facts wrong. Fortunately, we’ve gotten some excellent clarification on ALP from two PalmSource executives who would know: Maureen O’Connell, Senior Director, Corporate Communications and David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director, Core Tools and Technologies. These two comments provide some excellent clues about what we might expect in the future from PalmSource.
.OTHER
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been covering the changes in the Palm OS and its apparent eventual migration into something called ALP. As is always the case when trying to understand something new and relatively poorly documented, we got some of our facts wrong.
Fortunately, we’ve gotten some excellent clarification on ALP from two PalmSource executives who would know: Maureen O’Connell, Senior Director, Corporate Communications and David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director, Core Tools and Technologies.
.CALLOUT It’s not particularly our intention that MAX ‘inherit much of the traditional look and feel of the Palm OS’…
These two comments provide some excellent clues about what we might expect in the future from PalmSource.
.TEASER Want to know if you’ll be using the Palm OS in the future? Tap here to read the inside scoop.
.H1 Clarications from Maureen O’Connell, Senior Director, Corporate Communications
In your recently published article, "The future of the Palm platform: rosy or uncertain," you claimed it had been confirmed that the ACCESS Linux Platform is based "on Wind River’s Platform For Consumer Devices, Linux Edition."
I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that the ACCESS Linux Platform, recently announced by ACCESS Co., Ltd., and its wholly-owned subsidiary, PalmSource, has been designed to be kernel agnostic and does not rely on unique features of any specific Linux distribution. It is based on a standard version 2.6.12 (and above) kernel.
We will provide a reference kernel implementation, and expect licensees to integrate their kernel of choice, to better accommodate hardware designs, silicon selection and other business arrangements.
Aside from that issue, I wanted to mention that it’s not particularly our intention that MAX "inherit much of the traditional look and feel of the Palm OS" — while this paradigm works fine on PDA-like devices with touchscreens, it’s not as effective on more "phone like" devices — MAX is intended to address both effectively.
As our press release (at http://www.palmsource.com/press/2006/021406_accesslinuxplatform.html) says:
.QUOTE MAX [is an] an innovative application framework designed by ACCESS and PalmSource to deliver an intuitive, easy-to-use user experience and user interface for smartphones and mobile devices. MAX will seamlessly support the concurrent operation of multiple applications and tasks. It will also provide easy access to background tasks. Designed to deliver a predictable and intuitive navigation model for both one- and two-handed user interface schemes, the MAX framework offers the flexibility to support five-way navigation and two dedicated keys, as well as touch-screen and stylus input mechanisms.
.H1 Clarifications from David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director, Core Tools and Technologie
I’d say that WR’s calling us a "client" would be an mischaracterization. We discuss a number of things with WR [Wind River], we’re doing ongoing evaluations of Workbench and some of the tools associated with it, and we work together on things like the OSDL’s Mobile Linux Initiative and the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) for Eclipse, but ALP is dependent on neither WR’s kernel nor their toolchain.
We want the kernel additions and user-space components of ALP to be usable with WR’s kernel (within reason as far as version, patchsets, etc., go), as well as with, say, Intel’s kernel, TI’s kernel, MontaVista’s kernel, etc. (within a similar degree of reason).
This "kernel agnosticity" is a significant part of the reason that we put together a distribution for use internally and by our licensees on specific reference boards. Our own requirements for the kernel "ecosystem" might not mesh well with the road map of an otherwise-perfectly-good existing embedded distribution from WR or others, and we didn’t want to be limited by someone else’s schedule.
It’s not our direction to be an "embedded distribution vendor" — we market a platform intended for some fairly targeted purposes and our primary "value add" isn’t in the kernel per se (although we do work in that space to support that "value add"). Of course, we’re perfectly happy if a licensee wishes to work with the kernel ecosystem we provide.
.BEGIN_KEEP
Wind River has an interesting set of tools; we’re actively looking into the possibilitiy of using some of them in our own development, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d be useful to some of our licensees, another reason for us to be interested in working with — while not being dependent on — WR. But we’re similarly working with Code Sourcery’s EABI-compliant versions of the gcc tool chain, so as to be able to coexist with code compiled with proprietary toolchains like ARM’s RVDS suite.
The other major inaccuracy actually seems to have been Linux Devices’ rather than yours: Maureen O’Connell is _our_ PR representative, not Wind River’s. Your "confirmation" of our relationship with WR represented a pretty significant departure from reality, however, and I wanted to correct that.
.H1 Wrap up
David also pointed us to the same press release quote listed above in Maureen’s letter and the same clarification on the user-interface issues related to MAX and the Palm OS. Be sure to read the full release for more details. It’s this kind of dialog between platform vendors and user community that may give the new PalmSource/ACCESS venture a good chance to create a viable product.
We’ll continue to bring you more coverage on this over time.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Wind River, visit http://www.windriver.com.
To read PalmSource’s release, visit http://www.palmsource.com/press/2006/021406_accesslinuxplatform.html.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.END_KEEP
