PalmSource Unveils Palm OS 6.1 For Smartphones

TourmalineT writes "PalmSource has introduced Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 during their European DevCon. Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 is aimed at next-gen smartphones and provides VGA support, enhanced integrated telephony features, roaming support for WiFi and Bluetooth and enhancements to the user interface. They have also announced a new web browser and free platform development tools based on the open source Eclipse IDE."

Everyone's looking forward to the new features.

[cbiffle]

I think this might well be the first time, in my memory, that a company has released an upgrade to an OS that's more or less unreleased.

Sure, you've been able to run OS6 on an emulator for about a year now, but there have been a grand total of zero OS6 devices released.

But, hey, at least we can all go upgrade our emulators!

Re:Everyone's looking forward to the new features.

[Trejkaz]

Gotta love that twelve month lag. It's all due to the stupid notion the pocket market has, that you don't upgrade the OS on a handheld computer.

If Palm had decided to support upgrading the OS as it were released, I would have been running OS 6.0 on my Tungsten T3 as early as possible. It's not like when Windows XP came out that people had to wait twelve months for a computer to get it preinstalled. The pocket market is fucking bullshit.

Playing the Microsoft game

[tod_miller]

They don't want you just swapping out the OS, they want you to keep on a treadmill of new device new OS, this is reciprocal. If they can tie thier OS into the handheld like that, when a new model comes out, you wont wanna be paying a small upgrade, you want to buy a whole new OS lock stock in the OEM pricing.

My Dell 624mhz will love a nice linux aimed at it, let me go check the familiar project right now!

Linux on handhelds - the future of computing!

(imagine a WiFi'd beowulf of those! :-) or a zombified n

Re:Playing the Microsoft game

[smittyoneeach]

I, for one, lust after the idea of running emacs on a Kyocera smartphone.
Emacs' general indifference towards screen hardware and input devices, beyond a keyboard, would make it the primo application to run on a PalmOS device.
Granted, you need a memory expansion chip to hold the all of the files and executables and such, but, hey...

Re:Emacs on a handheld

[Abreu]

But... how would you do the finger-twisting multiple key commands of Emacs on a phone or a pda?

Question

[El]

Does Cobalt 6.1 have a WiFi configuration tool? Where do I go for more information?

Re:Question

[gl4ss]

maybe.

what i would be asking would be "will there be a device done for it soon?".

what good does a wifi configurator do when you don't have wifi, or even a device...

Treo 650?

[VJoseph]

Nice. I wonder if this new OS will be on the Treo 650 that is rumored to be out in October. Palm has registered the domain treo650.com but so far has given no official information on this device, that I know of. I hope it will. I mean what other product do they have that it can really be used on.

Multitasking

[$exyNerdie]

I have Handspring Treo 600 with Palm OS 5.1 and it lacks multitasking. If you go to a different application, you have to restart the original one. It sucks. Hope Palmone has included multi tasking in it

Re:Multitasking

[Polo]

Your comment is misleading.

You can easily switch back and forth between applications and there is no real functionality lost.

True you can't run 3 applications simultaneously on the screen at one time or something, but you can do several tasks and switch back and forth.

How do you explain being talking on the phone, and then switching to notepad or calendar to check something or enter some data, then switching back to the phone call (still in progress?)

When I exit a game, then switch back to it it's still in progress...

busy screenshots?

[Polo]

I'm looking at the screenshots and my perception is that the modeline is too busy. It's starting to look like people's out-of-control systray stuff on windows.

I think that palm might be losing it's simplicity in design to "design by committee" feature creepage.

Re:busy screenshots?

[BenjyD]

11 or 12 icons is quite a lot to squeeze on a toolbar. Don't forget that this is designed for new Palms though, which have bigger screeens.
Hopefully it won't end up like QEdit, though

Re:busy screenshots?

[BenjyD]

:%s/QEdit/Pedit/g

Porting wxWidgets to Palm OS 6

[VZ]

It's encouraging that PalmOS 6 looks to be somewhat easier to program for than previous PalmOS versions. In fact, sufficiently so that it looks like it should be possible to port wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org] (ex-wxWindows) to it and start writing programs which work on both PocketPC (with wxWinCE) and Palm devices.

If someone here is interested in helping with this effort, have a look at wxPalm contest [wxwidgets.org] page!