We have heard lots of reports from analysts lately that show the PDA market being overcome by the pdaPhone market in the not to distant future. The major OS developers are following a pattern that seems to support that claim. First off, Symbian has always been a pdaPhone oriented OS. This past year, Microsoft rebranded it's PDA OS as Windows Mobile, and has also continued to develop its Smartphone OS... two operating systems targeting the high and low end of the pdaPhone marketplace.
Now it appears that PalmSource is following suite. We know that they have been working on Palm OS 6 for some time now, and that this will have many advanced capabilities. PalmSource has now announced that they are working on a pdaPhone-ready version of Palm OS 5, to be released along side Palm OS 6. Why the dual strategy, and apparant step back? They believe that the footprint of Palm OS 5 is small enough to drive pdaPhone prices under the $200 mark. Palm OS 6 will be targeted at higher end converged devices which will cost more.
Also reported is that PalmSource is working on an abstraction layer of the OS to allow for better integration with carriers. Today, all of the OS platforms - Symbian, Pocket PC, and Palm - have to be customized by carriers. This makes it very costly to deliver updates, and requires the support of many different OS versions. This abstraction layer would be a major step towards simplifying the deployment and support of pdaPhones by the carriers.
Read the source article at
Computer Business Review.
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