Symbian: Palm's cellular lifeline
The deal also throws Palm a cellular lifeline -- allying the popular Palm user interface to an industrial-strength operating system core endorsed by the majority of the world's handset manufacturers.
Palm also gains access to GSM expertise -- the dominant digital cellular technology globally. Palm's existing agreement with Qualcomm (Nasdaq:QCOM) extends to the U.S.-only CDMA standard.
As a result, applications written for Palm OS and EPOC will be interoperable at the source level.
Symbian is a privately held company created 15 months ago to develop the EPOC operating system, originally created by Psion Plc for mobile devices. The members, including Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola and Psion itself, account for around 80 percent of cellular handsets.
'Bad news for Microsoft'
The world's largest handset manufacturer, Finnish-based Nokia, also agreed to create pen-based EPOC devices using the Palm user interface. Nokia is the leading cellular handset manufacturer, and Palm the leading PDA manufacturer, outselling Windows CE by a ratio of 5-to-1, according to analysts IDC Research. And both Symbian and Palm agreed to investigate future developments.
"We'll be compatible at the source level, not at the binary level," said Mark Bercow, VP for Strategic Alliances and Platform development at Palm. "This is bad news for Microsoft."
But both Symbian and Palm chose a different emphasis for the announcement to reassure their development communities. Speaking from Geneva, Symbian's vice president for sales and marketing Juha Christensen told ZDNet that "80 percent of the operating system -- the kernel and the middleware needed for mobile communications -- will come from Symbian. Palm has a very light user interface. But Nokia has hundreds of engineers working on reference designs of its own for EPOC machines."
Bercrow said that talk of a major partnership was premature. "There's been no cross-licensing with Symbian here. The licensing and software development agreement is with Nokia. No other parties were involved," he said.
Bercrow said that the Palm OS had always been portable to different hardware and different kernels. Palm uses the AMX 68000 kernel from Kadak Products Ltd, a manufacturer of real-time systems software based in Vancouver, Canada. "We'll preserve the APIs and be compatible at source level," he said.
"We can't have one agenda," admitted Christensen
Developers kits in mid-2000
Christensen said that developer kits would be available by the middle of next year. EPOC devices were being shown by Ericsson at the Geneva Telecoms show in Switzerland this week, although the majority of devices are expected to be delivered in mid-2000.
Microsoft's problems in delivering an OS fast and resilient enough to satisfy cellular telephony -- requiring fast response times and nested interrupts -- have led to speculation that it will abandon its CE operating system and instead buy in a solution.
The number of smart phones in use in 2003 is put at 600 million, according to analyst guesstimates -- dwarfing the 34 million PDAs estimated to be in use by IDC's Diana Hwang.