Access announces ALP “demo board”

TamsPalm reader Alphasmartuser has just made us aware of this very interesting press release from Access, the owner of PalmSource and the developer of the Access Linux Platform:

ACCESS Announces Turnkey Mobile Evaluation Kit

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, San Francisco, CA, August 7, 2007 – ACCESS™ CO., LTD. today announced the availability of a mobile Linux evaluation kit based on the ACCESS Linux Platform™ and optimized for the Marvell® PXA30x and PXA31x application processors. The evaluation kit will make it easy for OEMs, ODMs and mobile operators to evaluate the benefits of the ACCESS Linux Platform and native Linux applications for future mobile devices. The kit offers a complete solution with a full suite of mobile applications, including multimedia and messaging.

The pre-integration and optimization of the ACCESS Linux Platform for the Marvell application processors make it possible to evaluate the kit on a real form factor without worrying about low-level system integration. Customers can focus their investment on the level of customization they need to target a variety of markets with their future products.

“Today, customers are looking for turnkey solutions to reduce time to market and at the same time, the flexibility to differentiate their products,” said Toru Arakawa, ACCESS CEO, president and co-founder. “Marvell’s scalable, high-performance PXA3xx processors, running the ACCESS Linux Platform evaluation kit, provide a turnkey solution that integrates the technology our customers need to create exciting native Linux applications and devices without compromising on performance and usability.”

The Marvell PXA3xx family of application processors (internally named Monahans) with Intel® XScale technology was designed for industry leading power/performance features and a broad roadmap that is architecturally consistent for maximum software re-use. Marvell silicon provides the headroom for advanced applications with intelligent power management allowing manufacturers to differentiate current and future offerings.

“Marvell’s PXA3xx family of application processors brings exceptional performance and integration to low-power applications. Through our work with ACCESS, customers can benefit from the rapid advances in the mobile Linux environment to more efficiently develop devices that address a variety of markets with ultra low power, high performance, innovative products,” said Sam Arditi, senior vice president and general manager for Marvell’s Cellular and Handheld Group.

The ACCESS Linux Platform is an industry leading, integrated, commercial-grade Linux®-based platform designed for smartphones and converged mobile devices. The ACCESS Linux Platform is designed to provide handset and device manufacturers, operators and application developers with an open, extensible platform to develop, distribute and enhance a wide variety of mobile phones and converged devices. Because the ACCESS Linux Platform includes three runtime environments, it represents an attractive opportunity for third-party developers who can create applications that are ACCESS Linux Platform native, Garnet OS (previously known as Palm OS) native or Java™ native.

The Product Development Kit (PDK) for the ACCESS Linux Platform was made available to licensees in February 2007.
……

from here.

To cut a long story short…this means that developers can soon get their hands onto hardware running ALP. Yes, they won’t get PDA’s – but they can have evaluation boards for software development.

TamsPalm is currently attempting to get one of those from Access – let’s see what can be done!

Related posts:

1. The future of PXA CPU’s
2. Access (ALP) Developer Day on August 7th
3. Access invites developers to Access Developer Day
4. Access repositions Access Linux Platform to target MID’s
5. Marvell Armada 610 – gigahertz-class ARM CPU + graphics chip for mobile