Palm 6 -- Be cool
Joi Ito posts a comment in response to an article in The Register USA about a leak from PalmSource, the software division of Palm, describing the next generation of Palm OS:
Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft, and represents the culmination of work from the former Be team Palm acquired last year.
The new OS will feature multimedia and graphics frameworks drawn from BeOS, PalmSource's Michael Mace told us. Mace says this is real BeOS code, but Steve Sakoman, the team's former leader at Be Inc, and now PalmSource's "chief products officer" has denied that Be code would be incorporated into the new OS. More likely, we suspect, the new OS will inherit some algorithms and architecture from BeOS.
Version 6.0 will feature granular, application-level security and pluggable I/O interfaces. Which means that licensees can swap out the Graffiti input mechanism for an alternative, such as biometrics. Application developers need not concern themselves with the specifics: apps will simply receive an event.
Let's parse this. First, Be was conceived originally as a media OS. Jean Louis Gassée, Be's founder, demonstrated it as a media hub the very first time he showed it to me in 1994. Since the Be OS and Palm OS are markedly different, the supposition by Register writer Andrew Orlowski is probably correct that only certain functions from the Be OS have been integrated in Palm 6, but based on the addition of audio in Palm 5 (late, but welcome, indeed), the path from a single-market OS for portable devices to an all-purpose platform for use with a variety of consumer devices is pretty clear. This is what the talk of "feature granular, application-level security and pluggable I/O interfaces" is describing.
This is very reminiscent of the Newton OS, which Sakoman and some of the Be team worked on in its early stages. What goes around comes around, eh?