Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Japanese ACCESS Renames Palm OS to Garnet OS

Japanese company ACCESS, which purchased the Palm OS maintainer PalmSource, has changed the name of the OS to Garnet OS. The company has also unveiled its 'ACCESS Powered' logo. Mid December 2006, Palm, a provider of smartphones wanted to buy back the Garnet source code from...

Japanese company ACCESS, which purchased the Palm OS maintainer PalmSource, has changed the name of the OS to Garnet OS. The company has also unveiled its 'ACCESS Powered' logo.

Mid December 2006, Palm, a provider of smartphones wanted to buy back the Garnet source code from Access Systems Americas, formerly known as PalmSource. Thus the company had signed an agreement and coughed up USD 44 million.

Under the terms of the contract, Palm would obtain permanent rights to the Garnet operating system, in use on most of Palm's Treo smartphones and all Palm PDAs.

"This agreement gives Palm the increased ability to innovate on the Palm OS Garnet base, and to effectively differentiate Palm products long into the future," said Mark Bercow, senior vice president of business development at Palm.

"We value the Palm OS development community and are very committed to our loyal base of Palm OS customers, all of whom will benefit from the agreement just concluded with Access."

In addition, Palm also announced that it would continue develop the Windows Mobile system. "In order to appeal to US audiences Palm needs a Windows Mobile device to compete, and the same is true in Asia. Basically there is a hardcore of Windows users out there who must be addressed", said Rachel Lashford, an analyst at Canalys.