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Palm seems stuck in a rut at the moment.. but it does look like they are trying to make the best of a bad situation.

First they decide to run a huge advertising campaign then they decide it might be an idea if they had something to sell…

So, They’ve signed a new deal, costing $44 million, to allow them to use and modify the ageing Palm OS5 (aka Garnet) from Access (the company who bought software half of palm after it split from the hardware side).

"ACCESS has entered into a non-exclusive agreement with Palm, Inc., to license the Palm OS® Garnet® source code to Palm, Inc. ACCESS continues to license and support Palm OS. ACCESS and Palm have also agreed to an expansion of the two companies existing patent license.

Under terms of the agreement, ACCESS has granted Palm specific rights to modify the code base of Palm OS Garnet for use in its devices such as the Palm Treo smartphone family and the company’s other handheld computers. The agreement also grants Palm the right to use Palm OS Garnet in whole or in part in any product from Palm and together with any other system technologies. "

They’ve also quietly slipped in the information that the new OS (Access Linux Platform) is going to be available in the first half of 2007.

So with no sign of the  promised next gen operating system actually being used in their hardware for a while,  it looks like the elderly OS5 will be here for a long time. Well assuming that the success of the WM5 treos doesn’t take them in a new direction all together.

Source: palm : Access

PsionAndy (139 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook