Thursday, December 07, 2006

ACCESS: ALP should be released first half of 2007

Quietly inserted in a FAQ about the freshly inked deal with Palm over expanded rights to the Palm OS Garnet source code, ACCESS includes this brief statement:
We will announce the official name of the ACCESS Linux Platform when we announce that it is available to our licensees and developers—expected sometime in the first half of 2007.

That's behind schedule from what was promised back in February of this year. Sigh... I guess ALP is in good company with about 90% of the big software projects out there that are behind schedule.

It's disappointing to see delays like this, of course. But given the trouble that similar Linux platforms like Maemo and QTopia have had with getting acceptable performance, memory usage and battery life out of the mobile devices that run them you have to wonder if it's an altogether bad thing to have an extra half year for Moore's Law to do its work. One of these days I need to get my hands on the Linux-powered Motorola Ming and see how that holds up to the high expectations people have for responsiveness and stability of their smartphones.

Posted by cervezas at 12:18:48. Filed under: Mobile Linux

Comments

Hooray it's coming :-) Thanks for digging this bit of info up.

Posted by Legodude522 at Thursday, December 07, 2006 21:31:52

I'm not too sure about Linux on a smartphone. How long will it take to achieve acceptable performance?

Although different, the Linux GUI experience on a desktop comes across as slow to me.

Posted by andrew007 at Sunday, December 10, 2006 05:45:56

Linux is *already* a successful smartphone OS, running on millions of smartphones like the popular Motorola Ming. It's mostly an Asian phenomenon at the moment, but while I'm not without my own technical concerns, many analysts seem to think that next year is the year that it breaks out as a global smartphone phenomenon.

If the non-volatile file system currently in Palm's version of Palm OS is improved upon in mobile Linux (as I expect it to be) that's a significant boost in performance. So it's not like there aren't good opportunities to get a Linux smartphone OS to have the snappy performance that Palm users expect.

Posted by cervezas at Sunday, December 10, 2006 06:49:11

Add Comment

Comments must be approved before being published. Thank you!

Previous Item - Archives - Next Item