Introduction The Palm Operating System

In 1996, a product called the PalmPilot was released by US Robotics. The Palm Pilot ran on an operating system made especially for that device, called the Palm OS. The Palm Operating System (Palm OS) is the current leader in the PDA market, accounting for 70% of the market share. The Palm Pilot (now known as just Palm), became one of the fastest growing computer platforms in history, reaching the million-sold mark faster than the IBM PC or Apple Macintosh. Today, the Palm line has grown to include a variety of models. In addition, a number of other companies such as IBM, Qualcomm, and Symbol Technologies released their own Palm OS PDA models, with Sony's version hitting the market later this year.

Definition Palm OS
Palm OS is the most popular operating system that runs on Personal Digital Assistants,also known as PDAs. It can be found running on PDAs produced by Palm, Sony, IBM, Samsung, and a few cell phones. Palm OS offers a variety of ways for the user to interact with it, with a user interface that fits most users needs allowing for ease of use.

Palm Operating System Objectives

Flexibility To protect Palms investment in older software, OS 5 supports the Application Programming Interface (API) All Palm Operating systems were 16-bit and used a processor. The Palm OS 5 now uses the ARM processor because of its superior speed and architectural improvements Even though the Palm OS 5 has upgraded to 32-bit, there's such a speed improvement (2 to 20 times faster) that it has the ability to run.

Ease of Use
The two biggest differences between a desktop-based computer and a Palm OS based computer is the size and the I/O devices. Functionality is extremely important when designing an Operating system on a device with such a small display. The amount of information displayed at any one time is greatly limited.

Mobility
Mobility is another important objective of the Palm Operating System. Palm OS is intended for handheld portable devices. If the handheld is just a little too heavy or large, it stays in a drawer and never gets used. The Palm operating system software was designed exclusively for mobile devices. It uses memory and battery power very efficiently, enabling Palm Powered hardware makers to engineer extremely small and lightweight systems

Power Management

To minimize power consumption, the Palm OS dynamically switches between three different states: sleep mode doze mode running mode The system manager controls transitions between different power modes and provides an API for controlling some aspects of the power management. Sleep mode:-The Palm OS will enter into sleep mode when the power is turned off or after a few minutes without any user input. Run mode:-In this mode the display and the main clock shut down while the real time clock and interrupt generator continue to run. Doze mode:-While in doze mode the operating system stands by but the CPU does not perform any operations. Using this power management system, the Palm OS can run up to two weeks on a single charge lithium batteries.

Data and File Management

Palm devices do not have hard disks or floppy drives. Therefore, the Palm OS does not implement the traditional concept of a file system. Because there is no file system, no flash RAM support, and no secondary storage, the data is stored and organized in storage heaps in the devices memory (which will be explained in the Memory Management section).

Memory Management
Memory for the palm OS comes in the form of a removable card. The card can contain both ROM and RAM. The Palm OS is capable of supporting up to 256 different memory cards at one time, but to date all Palm products only support a single card. ROM is actually implemented as Flash memory and is somewhat editable as a result. The memory cards ROM size varies anywhere from 512K to 2MB. ROM is non-volatile, and as a result is where critical information is stored including the operating system and standard applications.

Palm OS Memory

Process Management
The Palm OS utilizes a single process mode kernel. This is similar to the original DOS in that one process is allowed to run at a time. That process will run until it has completed or it receives a stop event from the Event Manager. All applications that run within the OS are single threaded processes. User created threads are not allowed. However, the kernel does have the functionality to handle multiple kernel threads and does in fact run multiple threads at a time.

Security
The Palm OS provides various methods that help keep the users data safe. The first is the use of a password protection scheme much like what is seen in other operating system. The user has to enter their password to be able to log onto the system or use certain features. Data contained in the Palm OS is encrypted.

Conclusion
The Palm OS is very popular right now because of the large developer base and the ease of creating new applications. As more and more devices become wirelessly connected to the internet, I see handhelds devices becoming more important for everyone in the future. There are some things that handheld devices cant do that a normal machine can do, but the goal of this revolution is to move away from the desktop . To a smaller computer, or maybe just using home computer for backup and recovery purposes, either way, Palm is leading us into the future.