Day: August 31, 2008

“Wind River announced it will acquire a Korean developer of Linux mobile GUI stacks. The $16 million acquisition of privately-held Mizi Research will bring Wind River “world-class mobile expertise” and will “accelerate its mobile services presence in Asia Pacific,” says the company.The acquisition of Seoul-based Mizi depends on customary closing conditions, says Wind River, but is expected to occur by October 31st. The deal will not materially affect 2009 earnings, instead accruing to FY10, Wind River said. Founded in 1999, Mizi was among the first wave of companies attempting to commercialize embedded Linux. Today, it has 65 employees, and its Mizi mobile stack is integrated in 20 commercialized consumer electronics products, says Wind River.Mizi is known primarily for its Prizm lightweight Linux-compatible stack, pictured above. Rev’d to Prizm 3.0 in May 2007, Prizm incorporates its own small-footprint, embedded graphics stack. This makes it a bit less customizable than GTK-based heavy stacks, but able to run faster on less expensive hardware. Prizm is supplied as an SDK (software development kit) based on an Eclipse 3.0 GUI framework. It supports both Linux and Windows development hosts.” Read more here:

“Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab blog has published a new editorial by Brian X. Chen entitled “Palm Needs a Savior, and Treo Pro Won’t Cut It“. This piece takes a harsh look at Palm’s new Treo Pro, especially when compared against a slew of increasingly competitive devices from HTC, RIM, Apple, and any number of handset manufacturers.
In short, Chen claims that the new Treo Pro is merely a stopgap device—a “floatation device” as he calls it—to bridge the gap between Palm’s Windows Mobile-heavy 2008 and their “hopefully revolutionary” device(s) next year, presumably running the new “Nova” Palm OS replacement. In his editorial, Chen posts several notable quotes from a telecom industry analyst, a Palm spokesperson, and Peter Hoddie, the president of streaming media software developer Kinoma. The wide array of responses quoted in the article touch not only on the new Treo Pro but also Palm’s current activities and future outlook. ” Read more here: