Palm OS Cobalt 6.1?

[William G]

Does anyone know what's going on with Palm OS Cobalt 6.1? Does anyone actually have it on their Palm? Has anyone ever seen it on a device? Can it run on current Palm devices?

William

[RuiDuarte]

Nop. it will never be born. ALP is the next step (Linux).

[belangermtl]

I don't understand how PalmSource can spend 2 years developping an OS and
not even try it on a single device.

Maybe as an experimental ROM upgrade on T5 or LiveDrive...

2 years of work, so many money spend and nothing in return. How can they
survive without bankrupcy?

What was wrong with it?

[Jeff Kirvin]

Nop. it will never be born. ALP is the next step (Linux).
No, it's not. ALP will likely never be used by Palm. It's designed for the Asian market and don't let the fact that some of the code came from a company that used to call itself PalmSource fool you. However, Palm is rumored to be working on their own mobile Linux variant.

[Jeff Kirvin]

I don't understand how PalmSource can spend 2 years developping an OS and
not even try it on a single device.

Maybe as an experimental ROM upgrade on T5 or LiveDrive...

2 years of work, so many money spend and nothing in return. How can they
survive without bankrupcy?

What was wrong with it?
First off, PalmSource had absolutely no say in what the T5 or LifeDrive ran. Those devices are made by Palm, a completely different and separate company.

Secondly, no one licensed Cobalt. Was it too expensive? Too buggy? Not backwards compatible enough? We may never know. But it wasn't compelling enough to switch from Garnet for the people actually making devices. PalmSource was in no position to dictate.

[intellidryad]

This seem to be a frequently asked question.
Should we sticky one of these "Cobalt is dead" threads? :D

[William G]

Well if PalmSource is really giving up on Cobalt and just working on ALP what would be the possibility of them making Cobalt open source?

William

[dmitrygr]

Cobalt was working but no hardware manufacturer wanted to adopt it as it broke compatibility with much suftware made for os 3.5 and below. PACE is OS5 is 99% compliant, while cobalt is about 80. It DID run on a phone by oswin, a Treo, and a T3 at some point in time. However none of those was mass produced and the T3 update WAS NOT publically offered

[pruss]

Cobalt was working but no hardware manufacturer wanted to adopt it as it broke compatibility with much suftware made for os 3.5 and below. PACE is OS5 is 99% compliant, while cobalt is about 80.

I wonder where PACE+NVFS fits in this spectrum. I feel that NVFS probably broke (or at the very least made very inefficient) most apps that access large databases.

[dmitrygr]

i mean some 68k api no longer work in pace in cobalt that work in os5 cobalt.

[belangermtl]

Cobalt was working but no hardware manufacturer wanted to adopt it as it broke compatibility with much suftware made for os 3.5 and below. PACE is OS5 is 99% compliant, while cobalt is about 80. It DID run on a phone by oswin, a Treo, and a T3 at some point in time. However none of those was mass produced and the T3 update WAS NOT publically offered

And somebody put a hand on one of these ROM? ;)

[Sharkk717]

they sold a few of these phones to developers at the DevCon 2005 (last May)

cheers, tyler

[SoS]

No, it's not. ALP will likely never be used by Palm. It's designed for the Asian market and don't let the fact that some of the code came from a company that used to call itself PalmSource fool you. However, Palm is rumored to be working on their own mobile Linux variant.

Nice one Jeff


Palm Develop Linux OS (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6207)