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PalmSource licensed software from Extended Systems to bring Bluetooth 1.2 support to the Palm platform back in June (see PalmSource Licenses Bluetooth Protocol). That partnership bore fruit this week with the Bluetooth Qualification Program's approval for PalmSource to use the Bluetooth 1.2 stack in Cobalt, the next version of the Palm operating system.

Bluetooth 1.2 is the sequel to the current Bluetooth specification, version 1.1, found in most Palm handhelds that integrate Bluetooth, such as the Zire 72 and Tungsten T3.

Its main purpose is to reduce the amount of interference between Bluetooth and 802.11b or 802.11g Wi-Fi. Bluetooth achieves this through what's known as Adaptive Frequency Hopping, which alters Bluetooth to its environment, so as not to interfere with other types of wireless networking.

This is an important development, as more and more handhelds are combining Bluetooth with Wi-Fi. While some devices that are coming out later this year and the already shipping Hewlett-Packard iPAQ h6315 add GSM or CDMA cellular wireless to the mix.

Since the new protocol is backwards compatible, handhelds that integrate it can work with printers, headsets and other peripherals that support the earlier Bluetooth specification.

Cobalt
Cobalt represents Palm OS 6 with more than 80 percent new code. It is a platform designed to support multimedia, telephony and a greater variety of form factors than Palm OS 5, now known as Garnet.

Features of Cobalt include hardware memory protection and the ability to use up to 256 megabytes of RAM. It also exploit all flavors of networking and allows multiple sessions to occur with different networks, from Wi-Fi to mesh to metro Wi-FI and Wi-Max, plus 2.5 and 3G cellular networks.

The new Palm operating system also improves compatibility with Microsoft Office and Outlook, with past versions of Palm OS, and with other enterprise software. Other features include support for multitasking and multithreading, larger screens and extensible communication and multimedia.

PalmSource delivered Cobalt to handheld manufacturers at the end of last year. Since that time, not one handheld or smartphone has shipped running the operating system. Rumors, however, place palmOne's first Cobalt handheld, the Tungsten T5, as arriving later this fall. For more on these rumors, see Internet Breeds Cobalt Device Rumors.