PalmSource Ships Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition

Posted By: Ryan Wednesday, September 10, 2003 9:36:00 AM

PalmSource has begun shipping the final version of Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition to Palm OS licensees. Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition is the first fully localized operating system based on the leading ARM-compliant Palm OS 5 platform.

The launch of Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition opens up market opportunities for licensees and developers to broaden their reach into China, the largest handheld market in the Asia-Pacific region outside Japan(1) and the largest single mobile phone market in the world(2). Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition is a result of extensive development and incorporates enhanced multimedia and wireless features that extend the power, flexibility, and ease of use that has made the Palm OS platform a leader in the handheld and smartphone space. Palm Powered(TM) handheld devices have held the number one market share position as measured in units sold in each of the past six annual reports prepared by IDC.

"Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition marks a major milestone in executing our business strategy in China," said David Nagel, chief executive officer and president of PalmSource, Inc. "Unlike proprietary systems, the goal of PalmSource's open platform model is to drive rapid innovation and allow Palm OS licensees and developers to bring to market differentiated mobile products that deliver unique user experiences. PalmSource is committed to advancing the Palm Economy in China through licensee partnership, professional training and developer programs."

Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition will enable PalmSource's existing hardware partners, Lenovo and GSL, and future Palm OS licensees to deliver cutting-edge Palm Powered mobile devices for the wireless, educational, and enterprise sectors in China. In addition, Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition will arm Palm OS developers with essential tools to create innovative software applications for Chinese Palm Powered customers, thus accelerating time to market and increasing their competitive advantage. There are more than 19,000 software applications available for Palm Powered handhelds and smartphones. The final version of the Software Developer Kit (SDK) is now available for Palm OS developers via PalmSource's developer website.

Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition Features

Multimedia -- Support for 16-bit color and the most popular screen resolutions: QVGA (240x320), Low density (160x160 & 160x220), and High density (320x320 & 320x480) for rich multimedia applications and enhanced user experience

Data Input -- Dynamic input area (collapsible graffiti); common Pinyin input method and handwriting customization kit

Memory -- Up to 128MB of RAM support, plus card storage expandability for advanced enterprise and multimedia-rich applications

User interface -- Lunar Calendar Date Book integration

Separately, PalmSource announced a developer contest to encourage the creation of innovative applications based on Palm OS Simplified Chinese Edition. Winners will be announced in December 2003 at PalmSource's second China Developer Conference in Beijing.

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What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

Gremlin @ 9/10/2003 11:31:06 AM #

If there's a Chinese Edition for the Palm OS, is there still a market for 3rd party software that allow Chinese, such as CJKOS or other Chinese OS? Just curious.

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

nightsnack @ 9/10/2003 2:26:16 PM #

I should think so.. there will always be people like myself, who use english primarily, but like to have the option of keying in or reading chinese characters on their palm occasionally.

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

batmon @ 9/10/2003 3:41:23 PM #

CKJOS is good but can't enter kanji in Japanese. Anyone knows the solutions for this?

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

PhilP @ 9/10/2003 4:21:29 PM #

How well does CKJOS work with Palm OS 5?

I work primarily in English, but would like to be able to read e-mail, documents and websites in Chinese occasionally. The Tungsten T I purchased came with CKJOS software, but I never installed for fear it would create more problems and conflicts than it would be worth.

Now I'm curious though. Have people had good experience with the program?

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

kawawong @ 9/10/2003 9:17:07 PM #

Fine. Only some applications not using standard UI such as Document to Go (Word) cannot display Chinese Character properly.

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

framecatcher @ 9/10/2003 9:22:51 PM #

I've also been using CJKOS on my Tungsten T2. Very good. No problem at all. Quickword supports MS Word documents in Chinese.

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

asiayeah @ 9/11/2003 12:17:55 PM #

CJKOS supports traditional Chinese (for HK and Taiwan markets) besides simplified Chinese.

Besides CJKOS provides additional input methods.

And yes, there is certainly market for these Chinese overlays for those using the English OS. Until Palm releases an international version which supports all languages, then Chinese overlay software may be less needed.

--
With great power comes great responsiblity.

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

goulniky @ 9/11/2003 1:16:06 PM #

the only glitch with CJKOS is for non-Chinese text with extended ascii characters (e.g. é à ü). no problem with English but that's an issue in French or German. this seems to happen more frequently when in BIG5 mode than GB. I don't know if it's a limitation of the Palm OS or CJKOS fonts.
in any event, it would be a lot more flexible to have the ability to control display at the application or even document level than across all applications. I guess Unicode is not an option because of the memory requirements but as it stands, switching between traditional and simplified Chinese characters is a hassle.

Yv

RE: What will happen to 3rd party software Chinese software?

asiayeah @ 9/11/2003 9:50:17 PM #

> the only glitch with CJKOS is for non-Chinese text with > extended ascii characters (e.g. é à ü). no problem with > English but that's an issue in French or German. this
> seems to happen more frequently when in BIG5 mode than > GB. I don't know if it's a limitation of the Palm OS or > CJKOS fonts.

It's basically a problem with the Big5 encoding and the Palm OS internal encodings. There's simply conflict between those European characters and the Big5 character set.

In future, CJKOS or other Chinese overlay could provide some more intelligences in handling this kind of coding collisions.

--
With great power comes great responsiblity.

Full Chinese Edition

ray00pal @ 9/11/2003 4:26:19 PM #

I am just curious on why doesn't Palm just wait until they can release the Full Chinese Edition. It is not like the Chinese Edition is in such a high demand that people must have some incomplete version before Palm finish the job.

RE: Full Chinese Edition

PhilP @ 9/12/2003 11:47:52 AM #

I don't think there's really anything incomplete about the simplified Chinese edition. It's just that there are two ways of writing Chinese, with simplified characters and traditional characters. Mainland China uses the simplified characters. So it appears this OS would be targeting users there.

In any case, the simplified and traditional characters are close enough that users of traditional characters (in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example) could probably figure it out.

RE: Full Chinese Edition

FRiC @ 9/15/2003 11:14:57 AM #

The characters may be close enough (most readers can probably understand 80-90% and guess the rest) but the character input methods are completely different.

Besides, the encoding methods are different...