Palm acquired the remnants of the BeOS when that company failed. BeOS was actually a pretty cool operating system, or at least it showed great promise, but going against MS was hopeless and when Steve Jobs took over Apple and locked them out of installing on Macs their fate was pretty much sealed. Anyway a portion of the BeOS developer team has been working on Palm OS 6 for years now, and fans of the old BeOS have been anticipating the release to see that these clever folks came up with. For whatever business reasons, Palm has been slow to release a Palm OS 6 device. Impatient geeks can stop anticipating and start noodling around with it – Palm has long offered emulators that developers can use to test their code, and there’s now an OS 6 emulator available directly from Palm. I’m pretty sure these are win32 only, though in the past these emulators have also been available for macs. If you’re interested in tinkering with the new os, give it a try. And keep your fingers crossed for me that they make this backwards compatible with my much loved Palm Tungsten C.

[updated this 9-2013 to pull some links which no longer work. Amazed that they worked this long since PalmOS has been dead for years now]