The final release of PalmOS, 6.1 Cobalt: colour, multimedia, and multitasking | Hacker News Reader

The final release of PalmOS, 6.1 Cobalt: colour, multimedia, and multitasking

palmsource.com

19 pointslproven9 comments

Cobalt sim exists. There was also a phone given to some PalmOS developers with PalmOS 6.1 [1]. Internally at Palm Tungsten T3 devices were used to develop cobalt. A few of them "escaped" Palm running 6.1.1. [2] and have been seen outside.

[1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/7874/palm-os-cobalt-phon...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/cjx9d9/palmos_61_coba...

Here's a contemporary interview from 2004 with a Palm director who was a former BeOS engineer:

https://www.osnews.com/story/6148/interview-palmsources-geor...

Palm acquired the remains of Be, Inc. in 2001. The company made BeOS, a single-user desktop OS that caused a lot of waves in hacker circles in the late 1990s, but never found its niche or killer app.

After the acquisition, the Be engineers went to work creating a next-generation Palm OS that would retain most of the familar UI but was completely rewritten under the hood. Essentially like Windows 3.x -> Windows NT, but for PDAs and smartphones.

If the stars had aligned, maybe it could have been a contender against iOS and Android! I was always rooting for BeOS...

It had a cute design, but many perf issues due to the SoCs of the day. An address book with 1000 entries took seconds to open and draw. This was because every line drawn required multiple RPC to the address provider process. On those SoCs there was no TLB or cache PIDs, so you had to flush all of it on context switch. Now imagine an RPC: at least two flushes - one on the way there, one on the way back. On a more modern core it would work a lot better! OUCHY!

Note that Palm OS 6.x was never released on any devices. This was in the era when palm split into Palm One for hardware and Palm Source for software, and Palm Source completely failed to sell anyone their next generation OS, at the time everyone stuck with "classic" Palm OS (Garnet). Palm Source then pivoted to a Linux based OS around the time they were bought out by embedded web browser maker Access, which also completely failed to go anywhere. Palm (One) eventually just wrote their own Linux based OS with webOS, which... had a nasty accident involving HP.

this is false. There was one phone [1], there was also a ROM for TT3 [2]. I have held each in my hands. The second link contains photos I myself took, in the real world of a real device.

[1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/7874/palm-os-cobalt-phon...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/cjx9d9/palmos_61_coba...

Was that one phone actually commercially released by anyone? It just says that the OEM was shopping it around, so presumably more of a prototype than a final product?

A few of them exist in the real world - they gave out a thousand or so at PalmOS DevCon. To me that sounds like it shipped, even if in small quantity. These were not hand-built 3d printed prototypes. These were real devices with real injection molded silver plastic cases, operational slider mechanisms, working cell modems, and all.

I think "shipped" usually implies that one could buy them in some sort of official way. So for example the original chromebook CR-48 wasn't really "shipped" in that sense since you only got them as a devkit in conferences and similar, but the Oculus DK-1 "shipped" since even though it was a devkit you could buy it from Oculus.

At least that is the way I've seen the term used when it comes to development hardware.

I ported a Psion phone manager app (contacts & sms) to PalmOS. I can clearly remember the thrill of sending a message via the Bluetooth add on via a Nokia 6310i

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