The platform provider re-introduced Cobalt to the world with a new updated edition at its European Developer Conference last fall, almost as if it hadn't sent a supposedly final version of the platform to hardware manufacturers nearly 10 months earlier.

Another period of silence ensued until last week when Cobalt jumped back onto the wireless industry’s radar at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France. At the conference and exhibition Texas Instruments (TI) released two Cobalt reference designs for its OMAP handset platform, one for a GSM/GPRS processor and the other for a EDGE processor.

Group Sense PDA, a large Asian reseller of handhelds, is the first vendor to commit to releasing a smartphone built on Cobalt and would do so before the end of the year, reports Brighthand.

Although general manager Tim Wong said GSPDA would deliver a Cobalt handset in 2005, he did say a PDA running the platform could appear from another vendor sooner.

GSPDA revealed this information at a meeting of the Paris Palm User Group this past weekend, where it demonstrated its newest Palm-based smartphone, the Xplore M68.

Cobalt
Palm OS Cobalt offers a new GSM, MUX and a GPRS API to make it easier and faster for hardware manufacturers to create a Palm-based smartphone. It also supports NAND ROMs through an automatic backup and restore feature that prevents loss of user data in low power situations and during battery removal.

(Licensee palmOne has since integrated this last feature into the previous Palm platform (Garnet) with its Treo 650 smartphone and Tungsten T5 handheld.)

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless networking, one-handed and five-way navigation, and SDIO (Secure Digital In Out) are now all standard parts of the Palm OS. Multitasking and multithreading finally find their way into the Palm platform as well.

It also offers Chinese Language support—no doubt included in the upcoming Linux edition of the Palm platform, as a result of PalmSource’s acquisition of China Mobile Soft Limited—and the ability to handle displays up to VGA in resolution. This last feature should help Palm vendors better compete with the rash of VGA Pocket PCs currently making their way to market.

Other features include support for mesh networks, metro Wi-FI and Wi-Max, plus 2.5 and 3G cellular networks. It supports up to 256 megabytes of RAM, and improves compatibility with Microsoft Office and Outlook, with past versions of Palm OS, and with other enterprise software.