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To clear up the nomenclature: Cobalt is really Palm OS 6, but Palm execs said that vendors were concerned that the numerical advances would mean that Palm OS 5-based devices would suddenly be considered out of date once 6 came on the market. And Palm is still developing for Palm OS 5 - except now it's called Garnet.

Charlie Tritschler, VP of Product Marketing, said that indeed, far from an incremental upgrade to Garnet, Cobalt represents 'a complete grounds up rewriting of the operating system'.

Cobalt boasts multitasking and multithreading capabilities so that applications can be run simultaneously. Indeed, the interface now incorporates an 'application tray' - or 'slips' as Tritschler called them - where the applications there can be popped into view and then slipped back again.

There is also memory protection so that the applications are essentially sealed from interfering with either the memory or each other. It also supports up to 256MB in RAM and ROM and uses a block mode synchronisation technique to transfer large sets of data.

There are a host of security enhancements such as trusted desktops where a device will only synch with a nominated computers, and signed code support

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so that sysadmins can lock down the company's handhelds ensuring that only trusted and needed applications run.

The user interface is improved, with anti-aliased fonts throughout, the use of tabs to avoid having to scroll down long data records and drag and drop synchronising - you can drag a file on your hard drive to a desktop icon and it will synch to the handheld and Cobalt will know what to do with it and where to put it. There's also support for larger screens so that devices that are more tablet-esque in design are possible.

But most important perhaps is the extensible nature of the technologies in Cobalt - it's kind of 'ask not what Palm can do for you, but what developers can do for Palm'. All the databases are extensible so developers can add information to them and still retain the existing data sets.

The assets of BeOS mean that it is easy for developers to add support for new codecs in the multimedia applications via a multimedia framework. A security framework allows the incorporation of third-party encryption algorithms, DRM technologies and so on.

Much has been done on the communications front, with the adoption of the STREAMS-based framework that allows developers to concentrate on developing multimedia messaging, VoIP or whatever comms app piques the interest without having to devote time to session management - handling those sessions using whatever protocol (be it USB or FireWire) is already taken care of.

PalmSource has opted for the Eclipse Open-Source development environment tools in its Palm OS development suite and says it also gives the source code of its applications to developers to help speed the development process.

Cobalt was released to developers a couple of weeks ago and Cobalt-based devices are expected later this year.