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The company that brought you the Palm OS is demonstrating the follow up to that revered (and ancient) platform at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona this week. Through the pictures and descriptions later on in this article, you’ll get some idea of what type of features these smartphones may offer.

ACCESS (formally PalmSource) decided to give its new Linux OS for mobile devices the same official name as the codename its been using for the past year, since it first introduced the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) at last year’s 3GSM show. What the company is showing at his year’s show is no longer a pre-release edition, but officially version 1.0.

The developer is giving attendees a chance to play with the new ALP - running telephony, messaging and entertainment demos - with smartphones running on either a Marvell PX3xx (based on the third-generation Intel XScale technology) or Texas Instruments popular OMAP processors. Between the two, you’ve got most of the smartphone market covered.

Last month, ACCESS renamed the current (and presumably last) version of the Palm OS. It is now called ACCESS Garnet OS. This week, the developer announced it is calling the compatibility layer that allows you to run all your previous Palm OS software in ALP ACCESS Garnet VM.

The idea behind ACCESS Garnet VM is to encourage the thousands of Palm platform developers, creators of tens of thousands of applications, to stay on board with ALP and - more importantly it seems - enable end-users to not lose their (often huge) software investment should they purchase an ALP-based handset.

Speaking of ALP smartphones, the day we should see them moved a step closer today, as ACCESS has started distributing the Product Development Kit (PDK) for ALP to licensees. The timing of when a device maker receives the PDK goes a long way towards determining how long it takes for a company to develop and release a smartphone based on ALP. Now that the ALP PDK is in device-makers hands, actual smartphone development should begin in earnest.

ACCESS is also giving out pre-releases versions of the ALP Software Development Suite and Garnet VM Compatibility Kit to a number of developers. This way software vendors should get a heads start on creating new and porting existing applications to the platform.

Screen shots of the ALP interface show a mobile OS that is much more fine-tuned than what we've seen in the past.

The platform supports QVGA (240 x 320), HVGA (320 x 480) and WVGA (800 x 480) resolution displays from 65k to 246k colors. It requires at minimum at 200 MHz ARM 9 processor, but ACCESS recommends 400 MHz or greater be used. An ALP device should also run on no less than 64 MB of RAM and 64 MB of Flash memory.

A number of input methods are supported, including QWERTY thumb-keyboard, 12-key keypad with 5-way navigation, touch screens with digitizer, and 4 hard keys with a another optional.

Native applications include:

 Phone

 Contacts

 Calendar

 Memos

 Tasks

 HotSync

 NetFront Browser HandMail™ (available Q2 2007)

 SMS+

 iMessenger

 Music

 Video

 Photos & Studio

 Camera

 Documents (available 2Q2007)

 Utilities (Clock, Calculator, Recorder, Home Screen, Flight Mode)

No licensees have been announced for ALP yet. As for Palm, Inc. (from which PalmSource spun off), the only major licensee of the Palm OS (oops, I mean the ACCES Garnet OS) left, it hasn't committed to using or not using the new platform for future products.

Back in 2005, Palm obtained exclusive rights to the Palm brand and a perpetual license to Garnet. This could mean two things: Palm can call any future mobile OS it develops in-house the Palm OS, maintaining continuity with the past, and the hardware-maker could continue to tweak and build on Garnet for as long as it wants.

Whether it’s Palm or someone else, it is still too early to tell whether smartphones built on ALP will actually ship before the end of this year. Interestingly, one thing Palm has already done is commit to building new smartphones on Windows Mobile 6, and making an upgrade to Microsoft’s latest mobile device platform available for at least some of its Windows Mobile 5 devices.