Many people are calling it curtains for Palm today, as PalmSource announces they’ve acquired China MobileSoft and will be porting PalmOS to run as a software layer on top of embedded Linux. The details aren’t very firm at the moment, and one must wonder what the real story is rather than the rosy, forward-looking press release marketing jive. The idea isn’t necessarily bad—if nothing else it opens PalmSource up to a potentially much wider market. And I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but I’m betting with 10:1 odds that there’s no way this Linux PalmOS concoction is going to run on any current PalmOne hardware. It definitely looks like an act of desperation on the surface. We’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out.
PalmSource | ChinaMobileSoft Press Page [PalmSource]
