In a press release Access Co. Ltd., the company that bought out PalmSource for $324 million in cash last September, announced that ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) will take over as the next stage for the floundering Palm OS.
The Palm OS has been steadily losing market share over the last few years to rivals such as Microsoft's Pocket PC OS.
ALP should be backwards-compatible with many Palm OS applications.
There was no mention of the planned, but unreleased Palm OS 6-Cobalt, so it can be pretty much deduced that Cobalt is officially DOA.
To add an additional twist to all of this, Samsung, which as Pdaphonehome broke the news last August that they were pulling out of the Palm OS market, said that they are, "Looking carefully at the ACCESS Linux Platform...And will adapt the advanced technology faster than any others."
According to the press release the Software Developer Kit (SDK) will be made available to licensees by the end of 2006, so we should see devices running ALP by 2007.
Only time will tell what will be left of the venerable Palm OS by the time Access is done transforming it...