New Acorn mini OS

Acorn and has announced a new operating system targeted at the next generation of smart appliances.

The Gallileo OS will compete with the likes of Psion, Microsoft and Diba for a potentially huge market as smart appliances, ranging from email phones to web TV, challenge PCs as the most common computing devices.

Microsoft's Windows CE is an attempt to establish the Win95 interface in this area. Psion is working on a 32-bit version of its EPOS operating system

Galilleo will run initially on RISC processors from Acorn sibling ARM.

But spokesman Kevin Coleman said it will port easily to other RISC processors.

"We are not going to be precious about this. We will use anybody's chip," he said.

Galileo includes a quality assurance function which guarantees system resources to critical tasks.

- Toshiba has developed a Java operating system called JVOS for Intel-based PCs. It will be available in the autumn.

Acorn 01223 725000; Toshiba 01932 828828.