Purple Puts World Map on the Palm Pilot

Computergram International, July 19, 1999

Purple Software Ltd, the five-year-old UK company best known as an independent developer of applications for Psion EPOC handheld platforms, has published its first title for the Palm OS. GeoMaster is a 160KB package which gives Palm Pilot users a "tappable" and scrollable world map which acts as an interface to information about 1,000 countries and cities.

Tapping on the map around the north central area of France, for instance, would produce the longitude and latitude of Paris, the local time, sunrise and sunset, and a currency information. Users will also have the option to download further GeoTools from the Purple Software web site, adding cities to their maps, or updating currency information. GeoMaster is expected to retail for 25 pounds ($39).

GeoMaster is Purple Software's first foray into the burgeoning Palm Pilot market, and will be followed later this year by two other Palm-specific titles, including a game and TimeMaster, "which will have lots of things in it to do with time" said Gunnar Larsen, Purple's sales manager.

Larsen said the new Palm OS titles do not signify any waning of the company's commitment to EPOC, but simply underlines the company's determination to be a leader on all the principal handheld platforms, including EPOC (the operating systems developed by Psion of the UK, and endorsed by the mobile phone consortium, Symbian), Palm OS and Microsoft's Windows CE.

Larsen also said that there are no immediate plans to port the new Palm titles to either EPOC or CE. "The EPOC platform and the Palm Pilot are like night and day, both in terms of what you can do with them and how you program for them." At the moment, the EPOC environment is much bigger and richer, he said.