“Apple has reached an agreement to license intellectual property from a Japanese company that owns patents originally created by Palm and PalmSource, creator of the Palm OS PDA operating system,” Sam Oliver reports for AppleInsider.
“The licensing agreement for 1 billion yen, or about $10 million U.S., was announced by ACCESS Co., Ltd. and was first noted on Wednesday by Macotakara. Other patents included in the deal were created by Bell Communications Research and Geoworks,” Oliver reports. “The company formerly known as PalmSource is now owned by Japan’s ACCESS and is known as ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc.”
Oliver reports, “The licensing agreement is likely a key strategic move for Apple as it looks to gain some leverage in the highly competitive — and litigious — smartphone space.”
Read more in the full article here.
You could argue that the iOS grid of icons is, shall we say, an ‘inheritor’ of Palm’s IP.
I could say iOS ripped off Palm, but….
You could say it and you’d be wrong. Remember the Newton?
And the Newton got it from earlier PDAs like the Psion.
Newton came out in 1993 and was EOL’d by 1998. The Psion came out in 1999. (Newton came FIRST.)
I owned the original PSION Organizer and then an Organizer 2 around 1987 PSION was first as far as a product, I don’t think it displayed icons though. It had an LCD display that did 4 lines of text.
Ah ok.. I was talking about the Psion netBook which had icons and came out a year after Newton was end of lifed.
Psion icons were imitating the Mac. (Keep it going!)
Yeah sure. I have a Mac SE with OS6 that can display a grid of icons also, so Palm in an ‘inheritor’ of OS6.
sorry left nut far to much prior art to make a statement like that.
Is a Mac SE is mobile phone? I have a lump of coal that looks like the Mac SE. So what?
Does your lump of coal display icons in a grid? Are you just being contrary for fun this morning, or did you really miss the concept that Apple might use something familiar like a grid of icons that they had used previously?
…But BLN – Palm was not a phone at the time either – it was a digital assistance – as was the Newton before them.
Newton OS was the first.
Then someone would call you anti-Apple. Again. Surprise.
Knock Palm as you may, my Palm Centro was a workhorse for me. And it filled a crucial gap during the time an iPhone could not be bought in my state of the Union.
$10 Million in licensing beats a counterproductive patent lawsuit from a dead platform. It’s a bargain for Apple.
Steve Jobs had made a friendly offer to buy Palm after he returned to Apple. If I remember correctly, the Palm CEO laughed at him. Now Palm is finished and the IP belongs to Apple! Where is the “more blood” headline from MDN?
its a licensing agreement
not a buy out of the company, “Access” and all its rights.
Perhaps Apple should buy Access, out so…
it can gain a more strategic leverage.