George Hoffman: If you’re asking if Palm OS Cobalt can compete feature-for-feature with Window XP Tablet PC Edition, the answer is clearly no. Sadly, Cobalt will also not mow your lawn, feed your dog, or stand on its head and spit purple chiclets. If people want those things, they should look for another platform.
Palm OS Cobalt is designed to enable new classes of devices, and if a licensee wanted to build a tablet form-factor device with it they would have a powerful set of tools to use. The essential difference between the handheld and tablet form factors is the screen size and resolution, and it should be clear from some of my earlier answers that we’ve done the hard work already to scale up to arbitrarily large screen sizes, share that screen between processes, allow many windows to be onscreen and active at once, and so on.
There would be some issues that a device vendor who wanted to make a tablet with this initial version would need to tackle. These are mostly UI issues, and/or related to compatibility with existing applications. Our current PIM apps, for example, are optimized for a handheld form-factor and could use some tuning to provide an optimal experience on larger screens. This is true of most third-party apps, as well. But it’s likely that someone making a Palm OS Cobalt tablet would be interested in doing a suite of applications for it anyway, since the usage model is somewhat different from that of a smaller-form-factor PDA.
We’ve already done a lot of work to enable scaling to different device form factors, and that work is continuing. We feel that the variety of form factors that Palm OS can run on is a huge asset, and we’re doing everything we can to enable expansion onto every form factor for which there is a demand. So I think it is quite likely that you’ll eventually see a tablet form-factor using some current or future version of Palm OS Cobalt. I’m not sure that it would be flattering to that future device to call it a competitor to the Windows Tablet PC, since I would hope it would be more successful and less blandly generic than that product.
7. How is backwards binary and source compatibility with previous PalmOS versions?
George Hoffman: Well, Palm OS Cobalt is the first version of Palm OS to support native ARM applications. These APIs are called the "Protein" APIs, and they are about 95% source code compatible with well-behaved applications written as 68k apps on 5.X and previous versions of Palm OS. Initial feedback about the effort needed to "port" applications from the 68k APIs to the Protein APIs is that the effort is very minimal. Generally, the only places where existing APIs were changed are where they had to be in order to support a protected memory environment (for example, to remove assumptions about all applications sharing the same address space.)
That said, existing 68k applications continue to run quite well, including those that make use of PNOs (PACE Native Objects, which are blobs of ARM native code used for performance-critical paths on Palm OS 5.X/Garnet). The PACE layer (Palm OS Application Compatibility Layer) has been improved and we’ve tested against a large suite of popular applications. We’ve also been working closely with developers of applications that for one reason or another could not be supported via PACE (for example, if they make use of unsupported system calls or access private structures). We’ve seeded many of those developers and gotten them to clean up their apps to work smoothly across Cobalt, Garnet, and in some cases Palm OS 4.X and earlier.
The compatibility numbers are quite good; in fact, within the set of applications used for compatibility testing, our compatibility numbers are better than during the 4.X to 5.X transition. This is pretty impressive, given that we’ve been through a near complete rewrite.
8. Any plans to integrate more mobile phone capabilities to the OS and let PDA hardware manufacturers to do so easier as the two markets seem to come closer these days?
George Hoffman: Absolutely! Wireless mobile communicators and "smartphones" are one of the primary markets in which we intend both Palm OS Cobalt and Garnet to be leading players. Both products include new telephony features, and integration of these features into the rest of the OS is a big priority. Another demo at the developer conference this week was one in which a Palm OS Cobalt device, while playing a movie, was able to receive a phone call and check some stock quotes while talking, all while the movie continued to play.
Based on the amount of momentum that we’ve already picked up with Palm OS 5.X/Garnet devices like the Treo 600 and the Samsung i500, we think we’re really poised for a big market growth for Palm OS based smartphones. Palm OS Garnet and Cobalt are both designed to support that growth, and you’ll see far more integration of these types of features going forward.
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