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To: Mehrdad Arya who wrote (35522)10/15/1999 12:28:00 AM
From: Mehrdad Arya  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 45548
 
Wired News continued

Bercow: Presumably. But again, we don't need to license anything to Symbian to do what we're doing.

WN: No. But presumably the advantage would be to them, licensing the nice friendly Palm interface from you.

Bercow: Potentially. Sure. That could be one of the things we talk about.

WN: And that would bring the Palm interface not just to this new category of smart phones but to Psion handhelds and similar devices?

Bercow: Presumably. But that's still one of the things ... er ... that's not our intention.

WN: So if these smart phones run the Palm OS interface, will they also run Palm applications?

Bercow: The simple way I describe this to people is, you can think of an operating system as made out of three components. There's the microkernel. There's the next level -- the OS services -- and the third level is the interface and user environment. So what we're doing is we're taking the Palm OS services and the user environment and putting that on top of the Epoc kernel. So we don't expect there will be any sort of developer-visible interface other than the Palm interface, because those are the things you write to create your applications.

WN: So the long and short of it is that it will run Palm applications?

Bercow: Yes, it will run Palm applications. But there won't be binary compatability. I want to be clear about that.

WN: Binary compatability. What's that?

Bercow: So that's where you would take your application from your Palm OS device today and just run it on this new device that we're going to create with Nokia.

WN: So you will not be able to?

Bercow: You will not be able to. What the developer will be able to do is to use the same developer environment and the same interfaces. We anticipate that it will be nothing more than a recompile.

WN: So, applications should be easily adapted?

Bercow: Right. Exactly.

WN: And of course that's a great advantage. You have a very wide base of software developers.

Bercow: Right. That's the reason why. People are asking why did Nokia do this? The answer is to leverage the Palm economy -- the 22,000-plus registered developers we have, the relationships we have with Oracle, Cybase, Computer Associates, SAP. To put that on Nokia phones is a huge advantage for them.

WN: So what about Symbian? They don't have anywhere near the software or the developers you have.

Bercow: Right.