Intel will provide Intel(R) StrongARM and Intel(R) XScale(TM) Palm OS Ready solutions, Motorola will provide DragonBall MX1 Palm OS Ready solutions, and TI will provide OMAP(TM) platform Palm OS Ready solutions. ARM will work closely with Palm to ensure that the Palm OS migrates smoothly to the ARM architecture and that ARM development tools are optimized to support the Palm OS platform.
By licensing components of the Palm OS platform to silicon solution providers, Palm is enabling them to provide more complete processor solutions to licensees of the Palm OS platform. This should save licensees development time, freeing them to focus technical resources on innovative differentiation based on their own areas of expertise. In addition, it is anticipated that new segments of developers will use these extended device capabilities to join the more than 160,000 developers in the Palm Economy. Users of Palm Powered devices should benefit by having more innovative devices from which to choose, and having them available sooner.
"As the worldwide leader in providing the software platform for handheld, mobile and wireless devices, Palm is accelerating the choices and levels of innovation available," said Alan Kessler, vice president and general manager of Palm's Platform Solutions Group. "We are setting a new agenda for our industry that should result in more innovation and quicker development of ARM corebased Palm Powered devices."
"This new program is a good move for Palm because it should both shorten the time to market for device makers and expand the total number of copies of Palm OS in use," said Al Gillen, research manager, system software at International Data Corp. (IDC). "More copies of an operating system in use translates to a bigger market for application vendors."
"The Palm OS commands a substantial presence in the handheld market segment," said Peter Green, general manager of Intel's Handheld Computing Division. "Intel's highperforming, lowpower processors and Intel StrataFlash(R) memory, when coupled with Palm OS, make for a compelling and powerful platform. Palm OS licensees and the broad base of Palm developers will be able to take advantage of the full benefits of Intel StrongARM and Intel XScale technology."
"Motorola's DragonBall family has been at the forefront of the rapidly growing portable devices market with Palm's products for six years," said Omid Tahernia, vice president and general manager of Motorola's Wireless and Mobile Systems Division.
"Motorola's wireless embedded solutions have been the backbone of the phenomenal success of mobile products over the past decade. But the most compelling part is only beginning to take shape. Our ARM corebased DragonBall MX family leverages our systemonchip expertise to meet converging needs for wireless and multimedia applications."
As an extension of its strategy to support a wide variety of programming languages, wireless industry standards and platforms, TI expects to offer Palm OS Ready solutions based on the OMAP platform to major Palm licensees. Introduced in May 1999, TI's OMAP architecture is an open platform that delivers the required performance and low power to enable realtime communicationsbased applications. The OMAP platform has quickly become the de facto standard for 2.5 and 3G wireless devices and is also supported by a broad network of developers who design popular applications, including multimedia, security, mcommerce, gaming and location based services.
"ARM has significant expertise in the wireless and handheld device markets due to our industryleading lowpower and highperformance microprocessor cores," said Reynette Au, vice president, corporate marketing, ARM. "We are committed to enable our silicon partners to design innovative ARM corebased wireless solutions that run industryproven operating systems such as the Palm OS platform."
The Palm OS platform is also the foundation for products from Palm's licensees and strategic partners, such as Franklin Covey, Handspring, IBM, Kyocera, Sony, Symbol Technologies, and HandEra (formerly TRG). Platform licensees also include Acer, Garmin, Nokia and Samsung. The Palm Economy is a growing global community of industryleading licensees, worldclass OEM customers, and approximately 160,000 innovative developers and solution providers that have registered to develop solutions based on the Palm OS platform. Palm went public on March 2, 2000. Its stock is traded on the Nasdaq national market under the symbol PALM. More information is available at http://www.palm.com.
Palm OS is a registered trademark and Palm and Palm Powered are trademarks of Palm, Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other brands may be trademarks of their respective owners.