Palm, Inc. and its partners and third-party developers made a number of exciting announcements of interest to the enterprise market. We'll take a look at a number of them here.

Keynote
You may have already heard that Palm has officially split its hardware and software into distinct subsidiaries. We learned at the PalmSource Expo that the new Palm OS subsidiary will now be known as PalmSource, Inc. Whether this was done to make things less or more confusing, we can't be sure. At any rate, David Nagel is the president and chief executive officer of PalmSource, Inc., and it naturally fell to him to make the opening keynote address at the PalmSource Conference.

In his address, Nagel outlined a new strategy for driving rapid innovation into the mobile computing industry. He also previewed the Palm OS 5 operating system beta and highlighted the latest licensee and developer innovations.

Palm OS 5 Beta
PalmSource, Inc. previewed the Palm OS 5 beta, which they called, "The Foundation for the Next Generation of Mobile Devices." In the announcement they said the final delivery of the new operating system to Palm OS licensees is scheduled for early summer.

According to PalmSource, Inc. Chief Products Officer Steve Sakoman, "We are accelerating the pace of innovation. By supporting an open, flexible software base, licensees have the freedom to innovate and create differentiated products targeted at a variety of markets."

Palm OS 5 is designed to allow licensees to choose from a full range of processors, starting with the ARM 7 CPU and scaling to the highest-performance ARM chips from Intel, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. The operating system is also designed to offer enhanced performance, data security, multimedia, and wireless networking, as well as compatibility with existing Palm OS software programs.

Compatibility is a major issue. The Palm OS subsidiary said it is working closely with developers to ensure that current software programs will run on Palm OS 5. Software programs supporting application programming interfaces (APIs) based on Palm OS 4.0 and above should be compatible and run faster on Palm OS 5. The Palm OS 5 Compatibility CD with a preliminary version of Palm OS 5, tools, and 20 compatible software programs was being distributed to developers at the PalmSource conference.