Palm dumps Palm OS in favour of Pre

Palm has confirmed that it is dropping the Palm operating system to concentrate fully on the Web OS currently developed for the forthcoming Palm Pre.

Palm president Ed Colligan has told investors that the PalmOS is being officially retired and the company’s Centro platform will be the last to use the software.

“There will be no more Palm OS products,” Colligan said.

“We will transition to Web OS as our core OS, in addition to supporting Microsoft Windows products in the enterprise segment of the market.”

The Palm OS was introduced in 1996 and proved an instant hit with consumers and business users. Palm eventually split off and sold its software division to Access, which renamed the Palm OS GarnetOS.

Colligan said the company was now working to transition as many developers as possible to the new operating system. He is optimistic on this, since Web OS uses standard XHTML, JavaScript and CSS applications and developers will not need to learn new code.

He was also dismissive of that it may sue Palm over the new devices, likening the situation to two porcupines circling each other but being careful not to get pricked.

“There are no issues with Apple over patents right now,” he said.

“We’ve built a very extensive patent portfolio in the mobile space. The reason you do that is to have a defensible position in the marketplace.”

Meanwhile, more details about the forthcoming Palm Pre handset have been posted on the web site of Sprint, which is selling the phone exclusively in the US.

The new details show the device will have about 7.4GB of user-available memory, support stereo Bluetooth and will include multimedia messaging (MMS) services on the handset.