Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smartphones. 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 currently licensed version from ACCESS was renamed Garnet OS. In 2007, ACCESS introduced the successor to Garnet OS, called Access Linux Platform; additionally, in 2009, the main licensee of Palm OS, Palm, Inc., switched from Palm OS to webOS 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., which in turn was later bought by 3Com, 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. PalmSource was then spun off from Palm as an independent company on October 28, 2003. Palm (then called palmOne) became a regular licensee of Palm OS, no longer in control of the operating system. In September 2005, PalmSource announced that it was being acquired by ACCESS. 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 mobile operating system. Designed in 1996 for Palm Computing, Inc.'s new Pilot PDA, it has been implemented on a wide array of mobile devices, including smartphones, wrist watches, handheld gaming consoles, barcode readers and GPS devices. Palm OS versions earlier than 5.0 run on Motorola/Freescale DragonBall processors. From version 5.0 onwards, Palm OS runs on ARM architecture-based processors. The key features of