Palm OS is the
operating system used on
PDAs sold by
Palm,
IBM,
Handspring,
HandEra,
Symbol Technologies, and
Sony. It provides a simple windowing system, pen input (known as
Graffiti), and
HotSync desktop synchronization. It comes with some basic productivity apps including an address book, calculator, date book/calendar, expense tracker, email, memo pad, and todo list. Palm OS's key features that seperate it from the competition are it's simplicity of interface and modest hardware requirements.
Palm OS has gone through several significant revisions:
- 1.0 was included with the original Pilot models.
- 2.0 was introduced with the Palm Pilot Personal and Palm Pilot Professional models. It consisted of minor improvements and bug fixes, including support for 32 bit and 64 bit floating point arithmetic.
- 3.0 was introduced with the Palm III, and all Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, and Palm m100 models ship with a 3.x OS. 3.0 added support for user supplied fonts, added a new large font, added support for streaming files (previous versions supported random access database style files only), improved sound support (MIDI playback), support for the new IR port on all Palms including an API for beaming, and the ability to create user interfaces dynamically.
- 3.1 added support for international character sets and added support for the EZ Dragonball processor. It also changed the character set used to the Windows-1252 code page.
- 3.2 was minor updates plus wireless networking support for the Palm VII.
- 3.3 had minor networking improvemnts.
- 3.5 added support for color and improved internationalization with database overlays.
- 4.0 was introduced with the Palm m500 and Palm m505 models. It's new features included enhanced security, support for vibrating alarms, 16 bit color support, and support for removable storage.
- 5.0 will have support for ARM processors, higher screen resolutions, Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless support, and built-in 128-bit key RC4 encryption, plus SSL/TLS support