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.