PalmSource, the keeper of the Palm OS, is making an all out effort to court uses in China, not only the most populace country in the world, but also the largest developing market for handhelds (second only to Japan). This became particularly evident this week at PalmSource's Second Annual China Conference.

As reported earlier, Legend has introduced the first two handhelds, the Lenovo P100 and P300, built on PalmSource's Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition operating system. In addition, the Founder Technology Group (Foundertech), another large Chinese PC vendor, has also licensed the Palm OS to distribute Palm devices in China.

PalmSource has also launched an online Chinese Palm OS developer forum with the China Software Developer Network (CSDN), a website for professional software developers.

According to the companies, the forum provides a repository with the latest technical information, resources and support for the Chinese Palm OS developer community. In it, Chinese Palm OS developers can communicate with each other, share experiences and exchange technical and business information. PalmSource said it will monitor and moderate this forum along with volunteers.

In other developer news, NSBasic announced the availability of NS Basic/Palm Chinese Edition, a tool for building Chinese language applications. NS Basic/Palm for Palm OS 5.3 Chinese Edition is one of the first developer tools available for Chinese software programmers and includes a 140-page Chinese language hardcopy handbook, online help in Chinese and full support for Chinese character sets in applications.

Last but not least, what would a developer conference be without awards. At its Chinese conference, PalmSource honored three Palm OS developers with the first Chinese Powered Up Awards. The awards recognize three developers who have created software that takes advantage of the new features of Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition. The company said winners were selected based on the following criteria: innovation, newness to the category, value, ease-of-use, expansion and relevance to the Chinese market.

Kinoma Player 2 SC by Kinoma won in the best Games/Entertainment category. Kinoma Player 2 is a platform for delivering interactive multimedia applications and one of the most popular video players for the Palm OS.

ESRI China (HK) Global Business/AirZip won for best Business/Utilities solution. AirZip client and server software solutions enable images - maps, schematics, drawings, pictures, and signatures -- to be encoded and displayed on a Palm OS wireless devices.

Memory Engine on English Study by Mintel Learning Technologies, a learning system that provides Chinese students with vocabulary building tools for the English language, won in the best Home/Education category. This solution is also being built into Legend's new Lenovo handhelds.