A new development suite and a operating system simulator are now available from PalmSource for Cobalt, the latest version of the Palm OS.

While no devices are available yet with this OS, it was shipped to handheld manufacturers at the end of last year, and was unveiled to developers at the PalmSource Developers Conference last month. By giving developers these tools now, several months before the first Cobalt handhelds are expected to appear, it gives them a chance to fine tune their applications and get them ready in time.

The development suite aims to help developers create ARM-native applications for Cobalt as well as software for the current edition of the platform. The new Palm OS Developer Suite is based on the industry-standard Eclipse environment, an open-source, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) originally developed by IBM that supports software development in a variety of languages, including C, C++, Java and COBOL.

As for the Palm OS Cobalt Simulator, it is not hardware emulation, so it doesn't recreate how an application would run on a particular device, but is rather the real OS running on top of the Device Abstraction Layer. The Palm OS core is made up of the various system DLLs developers see when they open up the Simulator folder on a PC. Because the system is in the DLLs, the ROM file differs from a ROM file that would run on Palm OS Emulator. With it, developers can get an idea of how their software will run on Cobalt based devices when they appear later this year.

Palm OS Cobalt

Cobalt represents Palm OS 6, with more than 80 percent new code, an operating system designed to support multimedia, telephony and a greater variety of form factors. It has hardware memory protection and the ability to use up to 256 megabytes of RAM. Cobalt was designed to exploit all flavors of networking and to allow multiple sessions with different networks, from Wi-Fi to mesh networks to metro Wi-FI and Wi-Max, plus the 2.5 and 3G wide area networks.

The new version of the Palm OS improves compatibility with Microsoft Office and Outlook, with past versions of Palm OS, and with other enterprise software. It supports multitasking and multithreading, larger screens and includes extensible communication and multimedia. However, there are no plans to support synching to the Macintosh desktop. Though a third-party vendor, Mark/Space , plans to offer this feature right away. Expect to see Cobalt-based devices no earlier than this summer.