Jean-Marc Holder, director of marketing with PalmSource EMEA, told us that the new Palm OS 6, or Palm OS Cobalt as it is now known, is designed with novel uses in mind.
Garnet [the updated Palm OS 5] offers an extension to the kind of products we’re seeing from Palm OS licensees at the moment [largely PDAs and smart phones]. The aim of Cobalt is to make something really flexible allowing potentially much bigger devices than we have seen before. If you build the operating system flexible enough people will come up with lots of original uses, he said.
At its most extreme, Cobalt offers the potential to support displays of up to 32,000×32,000 pixels. But Holder suggested that applications making full use of this capacity are likely to be limited in the short term. To put this figure in perspective, the maximum resolution of Palm OS devices based on OS 5 is currently 320×480 pixels and most PC monitors offer no more than 1024×768 resolution.
However, the range of possibilities Holder ran through still make for interesting reading. Among hypothetical uses for Cobalt, Holder proposed media devices, graphically sophisticated tablet devices and even virtual paper as possible applications for the OS. Tablet devices may be the most likely new form factor to see the light of day, with Holder describing Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system, based on the desktop version of Windows XP, as the wrong solution to the right problem.
Palm OS in its earlier OS 4 and OS 5 incarnations has already proved surprisingly versatile, allowing devices as diverse as the Tapwave Zodiac mobile games machine, Fossil’s Palm OS watch and Alphasmart’s Dana notebook alternative to be created on what was essentially only a PDA platform.
While Holder would not divulge any specific plans from PalmSource licensees to build such devices, there would seem to be little point in incorporating such functionality unless novel devices were planned at some point during the lifespan of Cobalt. With Palm OS 5 originally launched in February 2002, two years would appear a reasonable life for Cobalt in front-line service
Palm OS’s strong cross-device application compatibility will not be sacrificed in this effort to broaden the appeal of the platform, however. Look at how the mobile market is evolving. A lot of different device categories are emerging. Model T [one size fits all] thinking will be replaced by lots of different types. If we can get into these kinds of atypical devices while still providing relatively standard APIs we’ll be doing really well, he said.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
