PalmSource Broadens Product Portfolio

PalmSource today announced it has expanded its product portfolio with the addition of four new software products for mobile phones. With the recent acquisition of China MobileSoft (CMS), PalmSource's product line now includes software for smartphones, feature phones and mobile devices at all price points.

PalmSource acquired CMS as part of its strategy to further extend the Company's leadership as a software provider for phones and mobile devices worldwide. The combination of Palm OS and the new software products enables PalmSource to provide one of the broadest lines of mobile software in the industry, powering mobile phones at all price points in all regions of the world.

CMS provides mobile device manufacturers and ODMs complete, integrated software platforms and user-friendly applications. With the acquisition of CMS, PalmSource now has 10 licensees shipping CMS software on over 30 phone models in China. In the future, PalmSource plans to give the phone applications and phone software the Palm OS look-and-feel and data compatibility, extending the industry-leading Palm OS ease-of-use to all classes of mobile phones worldwide.

"Our strategy is to provide customers a full spectrum of operating system software and applications for phones and mobile devices," said David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, Inc. "In addition to Palm OS® Garnet and Palm OS® Cobalt, we are now providing customers with operating system software for both smartphones and feature phones. We're also offering three new versions of one of the most popular applications for phones-MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), an email client and a micro browser."

Available now, the new product offerings from PalmSource are:

• PalmSource mFone for Smart Phones
  A complete Smart Phone platform that includes everything from the GUI, to device drivers, network protocols, development tools, and end-user applications such as a browser, PIM functions, email, SMS, MMS, MP3 players, games. mFone for Smart Phones is designed to run on Linux operating system distributions.  

• PalmSource Feature Phone
  A Man Machine Interface (MMI) for Feature Phones that includes a GUI engine and applications such as phone dialer, SMS, MMS, Address Book, PIM, and WAP browser, essentially all that is needed for a Feature Phone user interface. mFone for Feature Phones is designed to run on any Real Time Operating System (RTOS) such as Nucleus and VRTX.

• PalmSource mMMS
  An enhanced short message service for mobile phones that enables transmission of graphics, video clips, and sound files. This version developed by PalmSource is a full-featured MMS client for Smart Phones, Feature Phones, and other wireless devices. It is designed to enable users to easily and efficiently receive, send, browse, create, and edit multimedia messages on handheld terminals. It complies with the OMA 2.0 MMS standard and can be ported to most Smart Phone, Feature Phone or wireless device.

• PalmSource mBrowser
  A multi-mode micro browser optimized for Smart Phones, Feature Phones, and other wireless devices. The browser is designed to be compact, fast, and supports both WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and HTML. By supporting multiple standards, this WAP browser from PalmSource is significantly more useful than many micro browsers because it can access all Internet content, not just WAP enabled sites.