ACCESS, PalmSource announce hybrid Palm - Linux platform

- Gary Thayer, Editor

3GSM World Congress, Barcelona, Feb. 14, 2006 -- (MobileVillage) -- ACCESS Ltd., and its wholly owned subsidiary, PalmSource, today announced the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP), an evolution of the Palm OS for Linux. The ACCESS Linux Platform is designed to be an integrated, open and flexible Linux-based platform tailored for smartphones and mobile devices. ACCESS and PalmSource expect to make the ALP Software Developer Kit (SDK) available to its licensees by the end of 2006.

Major components of ALP include:

- Standard, commercial-grade Linux kernel version 2.6.12 and above

- Optimized implementation of GIMP ToolKit (GTK+) popular open source libraries for the creation of graphical user interfaces

- GStreamer an open source, modular and multi-threaded streaming media framework

- SQLite, a database engine commonly used in embedded devices.

ACCESS says that where appropriate, open source components used in ALP are extended and certified by the company. For example, ACCESS and PalmSource will enhance and certify the open source BlueZ libraries to provide ALP with a Bluetooth 2.0 technology compliant software stack.

A number of ACCESS and PalmSource technologies have been incorporated into ALP, including ACCESS' NetFront web browser, PalmSource's messaging and telephony middleware, and PalmSource mobile applications including PIMs, multimedia, messaging, PalmSource HotSync and Palm Desktop.

ALP features MAX, an application framework designed by ACCESS and PalmSource to deliver a user interface for smartphones and mobile devices. According to ACCESS and PalmSource, MAX will "seamlessly" support the concurrent operation of multiple applications and tasks, and will also provide easy access to background tasks. The MAX framework can support five-way navigation and two dedicated keys, as well as touch-screen and stylus input mechanisms, for both one- and two-handed user interface schemes.

ACCESS and PalmSource say that ALP is designed to support the "existing Palm economy" -- though they did not go into details about such support -- as well as J2ME and open source developers. The companies did emphasize that because ALP includes open source components including GTK and GStreamer, it can support a wide variety of third party Linux applications and services. The companies plan to provide development tools and SDKs to enable developers to port existing applications and develop new applications for ALP.

ACCESS and PalmSource have also developed Open Binder, a component object framework, similar in general concept to DCOM and CORBA, but better scaled for use on small devices, according to the companies. Open Binder provides a inter-process communication (IPC) paradigm implemented as a kernel-loadable driver, and incorporates a broad range of programmatic utility classes and frameworks. PalmSource and ACCESS have released the Binder driver and its associated frameworks to the open source community. For more information, see www.openbinder.org.

The platform has so far garnered verbal support from several major companies, including Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, Texas Instruments, NEC Electronics, Wind River, and carriers NTT DoCoMo in Japan and Telefonica Moviles in Spain.

The mobile Linux market is expected to grow from shipments of 3.5 million in 2005 to 28.1 million by 2010, according to the industry analyst firm Informa.

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