PalmSource Signs Licensing Agreement with Chinese Firms

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, December 12, 2002

PalmSource Signs Licensing Agreement with Chinese Firms

China's hand-held computer market has been given a major boost following the three-way co-operation between PalmSource Inc, Legend and Group Sense (International) Limited (GSL) begun Wednesday.

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China's hand-held computer market has been given a major boost following the three-way co-operation between PalmSource Inc, Legend and Group Sense (International) Limited (GSL) begun Wednesday.

PalmSource Inc, the United States-based provider of a leading operating system for hand-helds and smart-phones, a subsidiary of Palm Inc, yesterday signed a licensing agreement with the Legend Group and GSL in Beijing.

PalmSource announced the partnership agreement to coincide with the opening of a PalmSource subsidiary in Hong Kong and a representative office in Beijing.

The Palm OS platform provided by PalmSource led the explosion of the hand-held market in 1996. Today it is used by more than 57 per cent of users worldwide, making it the leading operating system for handhelds.

As of December 2002, more than 25 million Palm Powered devices have been sold and over 250,000 developers have created more than 15,000 applications worldwide, creating a thriving Palm Economy.

David Nagel, chief executive officer and president of PalmSource said his company is excited by the prospects the new partnership with Legend and GSL represents in bringing leading edge Palm Powered products to the market.

"These world-class partners, combined with an innovative and talented developer community will catalyze a thriving palm economy in China," he said.

World industry leaders - including Acer, AlphaSmart, Fossil, Garmin, Handera, Handspring, Intel, Kyocera, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Symbol and Texas Instruments are all licensees of PalmSource.

The newcomers Legend and GSL, both leading players in China's market, will head the domestic hand-held market.

Lu Yan, vice-president of Legend, China's largest information technology (IT) group said with the support of the Palm OS platform, Legend is confident of being at the forefront of the domestic hand-held market.

This area of the industry has experienced something of a low phase in China this year with slow sales growth, said Lu.

Lu attributed the stagnant sales to the low-end hand-helds with few functions, which dominate the domestic market.

The introduction of the Palm OS platform, an open operating system which allows more applications, is expected to revive and prosper the hand-held market in China, added Lu.

Last year Legend was one of the top three domestic hand-held manufacturers.

Samson Tam from the Hong Kong-based GSL, the third largest handhelds seller in Asia, believes the co-operation will facilitate GSL's development in China and other Asian regions.

"The most exciting part is GSL has become one of the Palm Economy, which embodies many developers of hardware, software and application and will further diversify GSL's hand-held products," Tam said.

GSL is the producer of the famous electronic dictionary sold under the brand name of Instant-Dict.

According to statistics from IT market researcher International Data Corporation, China is the second largest hand-held market in the world this year, second only to the US. The market accounts for 20 per cent of the world total, and 71 per cent of that of the Asia-Pacific region.

Nagel said the company aims to create a community of application developers in China following its latest partnership agreement.

The first PalmSource China Developer Forum was held yesterday to foster a community of developers.

The flexible and powerful Palm OS platform will open up new opportunities for third party developers to create applications and solutions for Chinese consumers and enterprise customers.

"If these developers are successful in China, we will help them to incorporate into the worldwide market,"said Nagel.

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