Palm roadmap

PalmOS 3.3 was released on October 18th during the developer conference; a surprise announcement that saw noted developers rushing from the hall to update their web pages. It ships in the Palm Vx, but other recent models can be flash upgraded to 3.3. Main advantages are much improved support for infra-red and faster synchronisation. You can specify cradle or infra-red for different uses, such as local synchronisation or networking; and the old IRenhance patch is no longer required. It also includes a Euro character - extended shift (backslash) e, for those who don't have 3.3 yet.

Colour PalmOS

New button bar

Text selection coloured in

The big news is that PalmOS 3.5 should ship in the first half of 2000, and will include colour support. Up to 8 bit colour (4,096 colours) is supported, with various intermediate options. There are a few extra enhancements, such as an agenda view on Date Book, showing today's appointments in the top half of the screen, and to do items in the bottom half, title bars can now drop down menus without the hack, and the web clipping API is included (and not just on Palm VII). Double tapping now selects a word, and triple tapping selects a line, and there is a button bar at the bottom of the screen for commonly used menu operations (cut, copy, paste). A version of this software, clearly pre-alpha, was distributed to developers on a CD.

Some internal work will be included in 3.5 to provide a hardware abstraction layer, which could be seen as a movement towards replacing the kernel in 4.0.

Motorola, who make the Dragonball processors that are used by Palm, have announced a new, much faster processor in the family, called the VZ, that runs at 33 MHz (the current Palms all run at 16 MHz), and includes a hardware driver for a 256 colour LCD display. Wild speculation would make this the basis of a new Palm device; and as Palm historically have announced new products at the end of the first quarter, in time for CeBIT, this all looks like it might come together for a colour enhanced, fast, new Palm.

PalmOS 4.0 should arrive at the end of 2000, or in early 2001. It will be destined to support a "communicator" device, presumably like the forthcoming Nokia cooperative effort, alongside the existing handheld organisers. This mostly means extending the hardware and kernel abstraction efforts, again presumably to run on ARM processors and with the Symbian kernel and services. It will also include a telephony API, just like EPOC, and quite possibly using the APIs in EPOC.

Other announcements, not given any specific release to tie into, included better conduit support, support for Java and Visual Basic - or a Visual Basic-like environment.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: January 24, 2000