Which PalmOS is really next?

PALM, LINUX, APPLE

I’m living happily with my Palm TX, but I’m already thinking about what comes next. (It would be nice to have a multitasking operating system.)

There has always been a lot of overlap between the Mac and Palm worlds. The original developers were Apple refugees. I know this is facile, but as I look at what has passed and what’s been announced for the future, I start drawing parallels between Apple’s operating systems and Palm’s:

  • PalmOS 5 is like the classic MacOS – the dead-end culmination of a long series of incremental improvements.

  • The future Linux-based version of the PalmOS is like OS X – a complete reworking of the system with a proprietary layer on top of an open source foundation.

  • Unfortunately, that means that PalmOS 6, the one that’s supposed to arrive next, is… Copland.

I hope I’m wrong.

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