Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system used for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on the ...

initially developed by

Palm, Inc. Palm, Inc., was an American company that specialized in manufacturing personal digital assistants (PDAs) and developing software. Palm designed the PalmPilot, the first PDA successfully marketed worldwide, and was known for the Treo 600, one ...

, for

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a multi-purpose mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. Following a boom in the 1990s and 2000s, PDAs were mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of more highly capable smar ...

s (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a

touchscreen A touchscreen (or touch screen) is a type of electronic visual display, display that can detect touch input from a user. It consists of both an input device (a touch panel) and an output device (a visual display). The touch panel is typically l ...

-based

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

. It was provided with a suite of basic applications for

personal information management Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents (paper-based and digital ...

. Later versions of the OS were extended to support

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

s. The software appeared on the company's line of Palm devices while several other licensees have manufactured devices powered by Palm OS. Following Palm's purchase of the Palm trademark, the operating system was renamed ''Garnet OS''. In 2007,

ACCESS Access may refer to: Companies and organizations * ACCESS (Australia), an Australian youth network * Access (credit card), a former credit card in the United Kingdom * Access Co., a Japanese software company * Access International Advisors, a hed ...

introduced the successor to Garnet OS, called

Access Linux Platform The Access Linux Platform (ALP) is a discontinued open-source software based operating system, once referred to as a "next-generation version of the Palm OS," for mobile devices developed and marketed by Access Co., of Tokyo, Japan. The platform ...

; additionally, in 2009, the main licensee of Palm OS, Palm, Inc., switched from Palm OS to

webOS webOS, also known as LG webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices, such as smart TVs, that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially developed by Palm, Inc. (which was acquired by Hewlett ...

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. U.S. Robotics Corporation, often called USR, is a company that produces USRobotics computer modems and related products. Its initial marketing was aimed at bulletin board systems, where its high-speed HST protocol made FidoNet transfers much fast ...

, which in turn was later bought by

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe ex ...

, which made the Palm subsidiary an independent publicly traded company on March 2, 2000. In January 2002, Palm set up a wholly owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS, which was named

PalmSource ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc. (formerly PalmSource) is a subsidiary of ACCESS which develops the Palm OS PDA operating system and its successor, the Access Linux Platform, as well as BeOS. PalmSource was spun off from Palm Computing, Inc. Pa ...

. PalmSource was then spun off from Palm as an independent company on October 28, 2003. Palm (then called palmOne) became a regular

licensee A licensee can mean the holder of a license or, in U.S. tort law, is a person who is on the property of another, despite the fact that the property is not open to the general public, because the owner of the property has allowed the licensee to en ...

of Palm OS, no longer in control of the operating system. In September 2005, PalmSource announced that it was being acquired by

. In December 2006, Palm gained perpetual rights to the Palm OS source code from ACCESS. With this Palm can modify the licensed operating system as needed without paying further royalties to ACCESS. Together with the May 2005 acquisition of full rights to the ''Palm'' brand name, only Palm can publish releases of the operating system under the name 'Palm OS'. As a consequence, on January 25, 2007, ACCESS announced a name change to their current Palm OS operating system, now titled ''Garnet OS''.

OS overview

Palm OS was a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor