Good-bye Cobalt: We Hardly Knew Ya!

Access PalmSource today announced the company's new platform that resulted from companies' union last year. The Access Linux Platform (ALP) is a Linux-based operating system using many standard Linux components as well as custom ones that take advantage of both Access's and PalmSource's expertise. The platform is completely multitasking, with advanced media, telephony and browsing / messaging capabilities. It will run classic (Palm OS Garnet) applications as well as ones developed for Linux using GTK (the same toolkit used to build the Gnome desktop) and Access's new environment code named MAX. Although PalmSource was strongly responsible for the applications in MAX, they bare no resemblance to the standard applications of Palm OS 5 or 6. The user interface has been completely revamped and redesign with both traditional Palm touchscreen devices as well as smartphones in mind. Contextual menus are accessed from a softkey and a display of running applications sits at the bottom of the screen where softkey labels would normally reside. When presenting ALP, Access representatives were careful to avoid any mention of the term "Cobalt" (Palm OS 6) except to say that it never shipped in any devices (emphasis mine). Access will ship ALP to manufacturers by the end of 2006 and expect devices to be available sometime in 2007.