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As much of the mobile world focused on CTIA Wireless 2006 last week, PalmSource made the decision to attend the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston instead. There, the Palm OS developer highlighted its Access Linux Platform (ALP) for smartphones.

PalmSource dropped all future Palm OS development in favor of Linux when it was acquired by ACCESS last November; a path it started pursuing when it bought China Mobile Soft in 2003. The platform developer hopes ALP will lead Linux - and itself - to a place alongside Symbian (the current market leader) and Microsoft with Windows Mobile, as a leading smartphone OS.

In February, The Diffusion Group predicted Symbian's 51 percent share today will fall to 22 percent by 2010, with Windows Mobile capturing 29 percent and Linux 26 percent of smartphones at that time.

PalmSource VP of marketing Didier Diaz said during a LinuxWorld presentation, "What Linux has done on the PC and server can also happen on the phone and handheld," according to Vnunet.com. "We want to speed up the creation of a complete Linux-based platform for the mobile phone," he added.

ALP is based on the standard Linux Kernel version 2.6.12. An optimized implementation of GTK+ (The GIMP Toolkit) for the creation of graphical user interfaces, GStreamer for streaming media, and the SQLite embedded device database engine. PalmSource says it'll also enhance and certify the open source BlueZ libraries to provide ALP with Bluetooth 2.0 support, for example.

The handheld platform developer and its parent company ACCESS also created components and donated them back to the open source community—Open Binder, for instance; a component object framework, similar in general concept to DCOM and CORBA, but better scaled for use on small devices.

ALP also includes ACCESS's NetFront browser, as well as messaging and telephony middleware and mobile applications—including PIMs, multimedia, messaging, HotSync and the Palm Desktop—brought over from the old Palm OS.

MAX - the new user interface and SDK (software developer kit) - enables all old Palm OS applications to run under emulation mode on ALP devices. Software created with the SDK - due by the end of the year - won't run on traditional Palm platform devices, however.

Palm Infocenter saw the MAX interface in action, or at least an example of how an operator might customize it for subscribers, at LinuxWorld (see image). The handset appears to be the same Haier Linux smartphone used during demonstrations at 3GSM in February.

While ALP is an open source platform, developing for it is closed; just like Windows Mobile, Symbian or the old Palm OS. That means if someone creates software for ALP via the upcoming SDK, then the application won't run on any other mobile Linux platform without being ported.

As mentioned above, there's support for mobile Java (J2ME), which runs across mobile platforms, and is already compatible with a good portion of the cellular handsets on the market, including Palm-based devices, as well.

MAX enables users to run multiple applications and perform several tasks simultaneously. It supports one- and two-handed user interface schemes, five-way navigation, two dedicated keys, as well as touch-screen and stylus input mechanisms. And since PalmSource is dealing with licensees and carriers, MAX offers partners plenty of customization options.

For example, should a PalmSource customer prefer Trolltech's Qtopia opens source graphics library to GTK+, then the platform developer would be willing to switch them out. The same goes for the Linux Kernel: PalmSource could replace the standard one used in ALP with MontaVista's if need be.

The first ALP devices most likely won't ship until well into 2007.