PalmSource Looks to Smart Phones

PalmSource is starting to reap the benefits of its recent acquisition of Chinese embedded software company China MobileSoft (CMS). PalmSource today announced four new software products for mobile phones, broadening its product offerings and increasing its worldwide market reach.

The four new products include: PalmSource mFone for Smart Phones, a smart phone platform development kit; PalmSource Feature GUI engine and applications suite; PalmSource mMMS short message service; and PalmSource mBrowser, a WAP browser for smart phones.

"Our strategy is to provide customers a full spectrum of operating system software and applications for phones and mobile devices," said PalmSource CEO David Nagel. "In addition to Palm OS Garnet and Palm OS Cobalt, we are now providing customers with operating system software for both smartphones and feature phones."

"We're also offering three new versions of one of the most popular applications for phones-MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), an email client and a micro browser," Nagel added.

CMS has a stable of 10 licensees in China and its software currently ships on over 30 mobile phones in that market. CMS is also in the process of producing a build of Linux that is specially designed for mobile phones.

PalmSource said in December it is broadening the scope of the project to include versions of Palm OS that will run atop Linux. PalmSource also intends to port the BeOS software framework and several of its most popular applications to the open source operating system.