Palm OS

Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smartphones. Several other licensees have manufactured devices powered by Palm OS.

Following Palm's purchase of the Palm trademark, the currently licensed version from ACCESS was renamed Garnet OS. In 2007, ACCESS introduced the successor to Garnet OS, called Access Linux Platform and in 2009, the main licensee of Palm OS, Palm, Inc., switched from Palm OS to webOS for their forthcoming devices.

Creator and ownership

Palm OS was originally developed under the direction of Jeff Hawkins at Palm Computing, Inc. Palm was later acquired by U.S. Robotics Corp., which in turn was later bought by 3Com, which made the Palm subsidiary an independent publicly traded company on March 2, 2000.

Palm

Palm or Palms may refer to:

  • Palm, the central region of the front of the hand (see Hand or Metacarpus).
  • Botany

  • Palm (plant), a plant in the family Arecaceae or Palmae
  • Traveller's Palm or Ravenala madagascariensis, a species of banana-like plant from Madagascar
  • Technology

  • Palm (PDA), a personal digital assistant
    • Palm OS, the initial operating system of such PDAs (succeeded by WebOS)
  • Palm OS, the initial operating system of such PDAs (succeeded by WebOS)
  • PALM, the acronym for Photoactivated Localization Microscopy
  • PALMS, the acronym for Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry, an aerosol mass spectrometry instrument
  • Business

  • Palm, Inc., a mobile OS developer and hardware manufacturer of personal digital assistants and smartphones
  • Palm Breweries, a Belgian company
  • Palm Pictures, an arthouse film distribution company
  • Palm Records, a Hawaiian company
  • Palms Casino Resort, a resort and residential tower in Las Vegas, Nevada
  • The Palm (restaurant), a restaurant chain originating in New York City
  • Arecaceae

    The Arecaceae are a botanical family of perennial lianas, shrubs, and trees commonly known as palm trees. (Owing to historical usage, the family is alternatively called Palmae.) They are flowering plants, the only family in the monocot order Arecales. Roughly 200 genera with around 2600 species are currently known, most of them restricted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates. Most palms are distinguished by their large, compound, evergreen leaves arranged at the top of an unbranched stem. However, palms exhibit an enormous diversity in physical characteristics and inhabit nearly every type of habitat within their range, from rainforests to deserts.

    Palms are among the best known and most extensively cultivated plant families. They have been important to humans throughout much of history. Many common products and foods are derived from palms, and palms are also widely used in landscaping, making them one of the most economically important plants. In many historical cultures, palms were symbols for such ideas as victory, peace, and fertility. For inhabitants of cooler climates today, palms symbolize the tropics and vacations.

    Palm (unit)

    The palm may be either one of two obsolete non-SI units of measurement of length.

    In English usage the palm, or small palm, also called handbreadth or handsbreadth, was originally based on the breadth of a human hand without the thumb, and has origins in ancient Egypt. It is distinct from the hand, the breadth of the hand with the thumb, and from the fist, the height of a clenched fist. It is usually taken to be equal to four digits or fingers, or to three inches, which, following the adoption of the international inch in 1959, equals exactly 7.62 centimetres. It is today used only in the field of biblical exegesis, where opinions may vary as to its precise historic length.

    In other areas, such as parts of continental Europe, the palm (French: palme, Italian: palmo) related to the length of the hand, and derived from the Roman great palm, the Latin: palmus major.

    History

    Ancient Egypt

    On surviving Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods, the royal cubit is divided into seven palms of four digits each. Five digits are equal to a hand, with thumb; and six to a closed fist. The royal cubit measured approximately 525 mm, so the length of the ancient Egyptian palm was about 75 mm.

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