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Since ACCESS acquired PalmSource nearly a year ago for $324 million, the subsidiary has maintained a separate - if blurred - identity from its parent company. This about to change, as PalmSource announced today that it is in the process of changing its name to ACCESS and merging its identities with the Japanese firm once and for all.

ACCESS clearly wanted to emphasize its brand every since it brought PalmSource on board. All development on the Palm operating system ceased and the next mobile OS to be released by ACCESS/PalmSource is to be called the Access Linux Platform (ALP), for example. While ALP, introduced in February, offers backwards compatibility to many of the currently available 25,000 Palm OS titles, the new OS was rewritten from the ground up using open source components.

To compliment the name change, the company today also unveiled a new corporate logo and merged the ACCESS and PalmSource Web sites. "Our new logo has been designed to symbolize the transformation of ACCESS as it evolves into a truly global company dedicated to providing innovative products and technology,” according to ACCESS CEO Toru Arakawa.

These products include the company's popular NetFront browser, which ACCESS said is now deployed on 279 million devices, including smartphones and PDAs, worldwide. ALP will feature NetFront as well, of course.

Although today’s move is not unexpected, it represents the end of an era for the mobile community. An era that started to close long before the ACCESS acquisition of PalmSource, in fact: When Palm spun of its software unit back in the fall of 2003 at the same time it acquired Handspring (and that company's Treo smartphones) and changed its name to palmOne. Whereupon in the spring of 2005, PalmSource gave up all rights to the Palm name to palmOne, which proceeded to change its name back to Palm, Inc. after two years running under the other moniker.

ALP is still a work in process that has come a long way since its introduction earlier this year. The first ALP devices aren't expected to ship until mid to late 2007, however.

During the summer, the International Herald Tribune interviewed the ACCESS technical officer, Tomihisa Kamada, who laid out the company's aspirations for ALP. He said ACCESS wanted to grow its share of the smartphone market to 30 percent by 2010. A tall order, considering it only has 4 percent of that market now, due solely to its purchase of PalmSource, compared to 61 percent for Symbian and 12 percent for Microsoft, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.