Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

ACCESS (the company who owns Palm OS) provides a Garnet VM for Nokia Nseries (N770, N800, N810). That certainly opens the door to tons of existing Palm OS applications, such as Google Maps Palm OS version. The Palm OS emulator on Maemo OS can either go landscape or portrait. On either mode, it only uses a tiny portion of the big screen. It actually runs smoothly and fast, just like you have a Palm device in your hand. Somebody posted a video on YouTube.

Palm stopped giving away IBM’s JVM since last month. I happened to have an old version on my PC, but I tried to install it to Garnet VM on my N810, it is not working

Just the other day I read a news that Palm denies Foleo delay. Now the official Palm Blog announced that they will “cancel the Foleo mobile companion product”. We might never see that product make it to the market.

… To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market.

…We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

The new version is 5.7.2.

What Palm and IBM need to do is to preload this thing on device and improve it to make Java as first class citizen.

Never mind. Everyone knows Palm OS is going away

In the past month or so there are a few mobile news interested me but I did not get the chance to write about it. So I just listed them here just in case one day I want to find the links.

1. Nokia’s free remote device access service

Nokia offered a free remote device access service. For now it focuses on S60 3rd Edition devices. Matt Croydon has a nice review with screenshots.

2. Nokia’s S60 Widget

Powered by Web Run-Time, you can write widgets for S60 devices using standards-based Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, AJAX (JavaScript). Here is an audiocast on this topic.

Microsoft is working on similar stuff - Windows Gadgets on Windows Mobile handsets.

3. Microsoft Deepfish

Microsoft Deepfish offers you full desktop browser experience on your Windows Mobile phone. I did not get the chance to download it and try it myself. MobilityToday has a video review.

Is iPhone the first one offers this kind of full mobile browser experience? No. It is the S60 Browser. The best feature of S60 Browser is not only full web experience, but also a paragraph of text will always perfectly fit in full screen width when you zoom in to it. So you do not have to pan it left and right to read it. From the MobilityToday video, it seems that it is not the case for Deepfish. But I did use it myself so I am not 100% sure.

The Adobe PDF Reader is painful to use on my E61 because it is almost impossible to fit a block of text to the screen width. This tiny little thing ruins the entire user experience.

4. Palm goes Linux

No. It is not the PalmSource - ACCESS Linux Platform. It is the Palm hardware company, which was saved by Treo handsets from HandSpring. The Palm - HandSpring - PalmOne - PalmSource - Palm story is much simpler than AT&T - … - AT&T Wireless - Cingular - at&t one.

Anyway, Palm officially announced that it will deliver a new mobile Linux platform combined with Palm OS Garnet technology on new products later this year.

Via MobileViews Blog

Information Week has a table that summarizes the road map of major mobile phone operating systems, including Symbian, Linux, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Mac OS X:
Road Map For Smartphone Operating Systems
Full article: How Smartphone Platforms Compare

I don’t think SavaJe should be in the Linux category. I do not recall SavaJe is related to Linux. At least all the marketing effort of SavaJe was that it is a Java-based platform. Initially it was not Java ME (neither MIDP nor PP) but Java SE, and that is where the company name is coming from (SavaJe -> JavaSe).

Linux in the mobile world apparently is very diversified. The most successful Linux mobile phone manufacturer is Motorola. It has launched many devices in Asian market, including ROKR E6, a ultra thin phone with 2 MP camera and touchscreen. Other major manufacturers include E28, Haier, Lenovo, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung. Mobile Linux vendors include ACCESS, MIZI, MontaVista, Trolltech and more.

Some other recent news about smart phone OS:
Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone will be renamed to Windows Mobile Professional Edition and Standard Edition.
ACCESS renamed Palm OS to Garnet OS.