Palm OS Is Now Called Garnet OS, And Takes A Further Step Towards Irrelevance

Thu, Jan 25th 2007 10:37am — Carlo Longino

It's a sad day for Palm fans: Palm OS exists no more. In name, anyway, since Access has decided to rename it "Garnet OS". Access has treated Palm OS like an unwanted stepchild since its purchase of PalmSource in 2005, apparently validating talk that all it was really interested in was the company's business selling phone applications in China. Access has basically completely given up on Palm OS, having essentially turned it back over to Palm, while its supposed next-generation Palm OS, the oft-delayed Access Linux Platform, really has nothing to do with the Palm OS at all. Palm OS has been fading into the sunset for quite some time now, and this move will do little to hasten its irrelevance. What's odd, though, is that the Palm brand still enjoys a lot of name recognition and has a decent base of enthusiasts, so why Access would want to distance itself from that is not at all clear.

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alaric, 25 Jan 2007 @ 10:37am

Garnet is BeOS derivative
Garnet was the internal code name for the beos derivative or perhaps it was the internal code for the non-beos former palm-os. I doubt it matters.
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David Beers, 25 Jan 2007 @ 10:37am

Misinformation
C'mon, Carlo... if you're going to report on Palm OS, please do your homework. The name change was not prompted by ACCESS, it was the result of an agreement between PalmSource and PalmOne back in May of '05 in which PalmSource sold the "Palm" brand back to PalmOne. ACCESS is just now coming (reluctantly, I'm sure) into compliance with the prior agreement they became party to when they acquired PalmSource. At best this is old news, at worst it's ascribes blame to the wrong people for the screwed up brand. Blame Palm for spinning off PalmSource back in 2003, which was what started the whole mess. And perhaps you could explain why the ACCESS Linux Platform is any more "giving up on Palm OS" than Palm OS Cobalt or PalmSource's previous efforts to port the Palm OS to a Linux kernel. In all three cases backward compatibility with the Garnet APIs was a high priority. ACCESS developed and demoed the Garnet Host layer in ALP before they even started on the native Linux interface. There's no "giving up" going on that I can see. Let's just hope ACCESS' better connections with ODMs and carriers will make ALP more of a success than Palm OS Cobalt was.
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