First screens of Access Linux Platform surface

It might not be much, but we've just sighted some of the first screenshots of Access Linux Platform (ALP) from Access PalmSource. The pics seem to show ALP running the Memo app in legacy mode, which means the OS -- which is supposedly shipping to manufacturers by the end of this year -- is finally ready for at least some level of testing. These screens of course don't give us much to go on as far as the purported GTK-based interface present in the core OS, but the presence of the OS on a Haier phone does match up with what we've been predicting about the Asian focus for ALP.

[Via PalmAddicts]

[SLiKone @ Feb 16th 2006 12:13PM]

From what I read, ALP would be able to run OS 6 apps, so maybe what we are looking at is an OS 6 app on ALP?

[motech @ Feb 16th 2006 12:16PM]

dam, i was hoping for a complete redesign of the gui.
the palm os is very lacking , and so its windows mobile 5.
they leave a lot to be desired,

why cant apple just make a mobile os? : (

[crabby @ Feb 16th 2006 12:33PM]

Huh? Who said the new PalmOS wouldn't look like the old one? From what I remember when they announced going to the linux kernel they basically said it will be the same user experience just with a different kernel underneath allowing new features (the little PalmOS 6 stuff we have seen looks a bit different but not radically). I've been following things and don't recall any indication of a new look and feel and personally don't think it is needed. The main difference I see with ALP is that it sounds like we can have 3 types of apps coexisting which may all look and feel different (I don't know) -- PalmOS, GTK+, and MAX whatever that is. It will be interesting to see how these are integrated.

[Joshua Ochs @ Feb 16th 2006 12:43PM]

Asshats. No one has said "it won't look anything like Palm OS 5" except you. Even the press release that you didn't bother to read contradicts that:

They specifically said they're leveraging all of the PalmSource apps because of their "recognized ease of use". They are replacing the web browser (fine by me), although I wish they'd create a WebCore-based one like Nokia did - that thing looks sweet.


"A number of ACCESS and PalmSource technologies have been incorporated into ALP, including:

PalmSource mobile applications including PIMs, multimedia, messaging, PalmSource HotSync and Palm Desktop -includes the recognized ease-of-use that users expect
PalmSource messaging and telephony middleware - a highly modular and scalable implementation
ACCESS NetFront browser - a proven success with over 200 million deployments in 721 commercial products for more than 30 handset and 90 Internet device manufacturers worldwide"

[otakucode @ Feb 16th 2006 12:44PM]

Linux is a copycat OS that was created to copy Unix, went on to copy all the other OS' around (their good bits mostly). They've never been the first to do anything, so this really shouldn't surprise anyone. If it didn't look like PalmOS, they'd just make it look exactly like something else that's already around.

[RyanK @ Feb 16th 2006 1:05PM]

Those pictures show just one aspect of ALP and not the full or final interface.

PalmSource did a small demo on ALP at 3GSM, showing Palm OS compatibility, GTK apps, and the new MAX interface. The new MAX interface is the main new UI and I haven't seen any shots of that released yet

-Ryan
www.palminfocenter.com

[Yrian @ Feb 16th 2006 2:02PM]

@Cullen: Me first!!!

[jjd @ Feb 16th 2006 2:16PM]

If ALP supports PalmOS 5 apps (as they have said) and PalmOS 5 apps always take over the whole screen, then wouldn't you assume that ALP running a PalmOS 5 app would look just like PalmOS 5?

[Kazriko @ Feb 16th 2006 2:26PM]

Actually, motech, Apple already made a mobile OS. It was on this little device called the "Apple Newton." Maybe you remember its great success in the mobile market...

[TC @ Feb 16th 2006 4:12PM]

Sloppy that they put a square screen app up on a rectangular screen. Wonder if there will be a popup DIA added later.

[Foxeh @ Feb 16th 2006 7:02PM]

The screen will be square if it's in a sort of legacy mode.

But hey, if they can get this thing on something as svelte as a cell phone easily enough, perhaps Nintendo should have a talk with these guys to see what they can do for the DS...

[Wytnucls @ Feb 17th 2006 1:55AM]

Phone screen has a resolution 240x160. Palmsource applications do not cater for such resolution and default to 160x160. Many independent Palm developers do support the screen size, thankfully!

[Reg @ Feb 24th 2006 3:24AM]

@Kazriko, good point. Apple got burnt by pioneering a market which didn't exist and also by building a huge, sophisticated Smalltalk-like stack for running bytecode, which required a lot of hardware in 1993.

By comparison, Palm apps could be written in tightly compiled C-based machine code which ran great on petite hardware, so when the Palm Pilot came along in 1994, it was tiny.

Also, the Newton's emphasis on handwriting recognition (which was rushed to market in the 1.0 version and embarrassingly poor unless the user was very careful) for input instead of symbolic input (tightly defined Graffiti strokes which didn't need much processing power to understand), meant that the screen had to be large enough to write continuous words on, and again it required more powerful, bigger hardware.

The Newton was great on paper, and the later versions (with handwriting 2.0) started fulfilling its promise, but it had already failed as soon as it was released. It was before its time.

The Palm was what a device should have been in that era. WinCE/PocketPC was a glitzier, more modern Palm copy, so it eventually had the baton passed to it when Palm's primitive underpinnings caught up with it.

HOWEVER, with the power available in 2006's hardware, a powerful Newton-like OS could be ripe for a re-emergence.

Apple wouldn't do it though: the Newton was John Sculley's baby, and anything to do with Sculley is unlikely to be in Steve Jobs' interests. Sculley was the one who kicked Jobs out of Apple in 1985, made poor legal deals with Microsoft, and set in train a course of events which almost drove Apple out of existence.