David Beers was in attendance at LinuxWorld San Francisco where PalmSource was exhibiting the Access Linux Platform. PalmSource also held a full day of hands-on tutorials in which they built and debugged native applications for mobile Linux. In this article David brings us up to date on ALP, its progress and other details on and what was being presented about ALP at LinuxWorld.
Access Linux Platform at LinuxWorld
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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David Beers article is a bit misleading. Trolltech not only announced an upcoming “handset”, but had the Greenphone on demonstration with a real working Qtopia, as well as other real working handsets that run Qtopia.
He was relying on a subtle distinction. The greenphone is meant to be a developer’s reference platform. The phone that ALP is using in its demos is a shipping phone.
It is a distinction without a difference, as I’m sure the ODM who makes the greenphone for trolltech would be happy to “design” a very similar phone for a customer, and, meanwhile, ALP does not yet have a customer.
I know PDA’s are out of fashion, but it was always the best platform for home-brew mini-applications you could carry around in your pocket. The article left it unclear whether this new OS would be for Palm or for cellphones, but I hope Palm embraces it as a replacement for their long-in-the-tooth Palm OS.
I would certainly buy a linux Palm Z-22 in a second.
The main target of Access/Palmsource is cellphones, not PDAs anymore. PDAs don’t sell anymore (because smartphones can do the same things), their numbers are very low.
And the PDA market is already dominated by PocketPCs with MS OS on it, so it’s hard and pointless to fight back in that shrinking market.
The article left it unclear whether this new OS would be for Palm or for cellphones
Cellphones, although that, in theory, includes Palm, which through the TREO series, is in the ‘smartphone’ business.
PalmOS was my favorite PDA operating system, but if I’m getting a smaart phone, I much prefer the blackberry.
I hate Blackberries. Terribly-looking UI, terrible fonts, and even more terrible web browser defaults.
Will Access provide Zaurus ROM’s of ALP? I would give just about anything to have a decent OS on my SL-5500. You know one that’s still being commericially supported and has decent Sync software.