Palm on Tuesday plans to show developers a test version of a new operating system designed to make handhelds more powerful and secure, as well as better able to connect to wireless and corporate networks.
Although the final version won"t be ready to ship to developers until the summer, Palm wants developers to start making sure their programs will work on version 5 of the Palm OS.
With the OS upgrade, Palm is moving to a new class of processors. Emulation software is designed to allow older programs to work in the new OS, but Palm estimates that only about 80 percent of programs will be compatible--the remainder will be shut out because of nonstandard programming techniques used by developers to make their programs run better on Palm"s current chip, the relatively slow Dragonball processor from Motorola.
Although Palm has been the market leader, analysts have been eagerly awaiting the move to a more modern chip architecture, as well as other features that Palm has promised for OS 5, including improved security, virtual private networking software and support for 802.11b wireless networks.
"Our philosophy is to keep the OS tight and reliable," said Steve Sakoman, PalmSource chief product officer.
At the PalmSource Conference, which runs Feb. 5-8, developers will receive a Palm OS 5 Compatibility CD that provides a preliminary version of Palm OS 5, tools, and 20 compatible applications. Tools include the Palm OS 5 Simulator, Palm Universal Debugger, Constructor and PalmRez, Conduit Development Kit for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET / Mac OS X and Third-party developer tools. Members of the Palm OS
Developer Program will be able to download the following tools from the Palm
OS website ( https://www.palmos.com ).