Palm has signed a deal to buy back the Garnet source code from Access Systems Americas, formerly known as PalmSource.

The deal will give Palm permanent rights to the Garnet operating system, in use on most of Palm's Treo smartphones and all Palm PDAs.

Under the terms of the agreement Palm will have full control of any future innovations it makes on the Garnet platform.

"This agreement gives Palm the increased ability to innovate on the Palm OS Garnet base, and to effectively differentiate Palm products long into the future," said Mark Bercow, senior vice president of business development at Palm.

"We value the Palm OS development community and are very committed to our loyal base of Palm OS customers, all of whom will benefit from the agreement just concluded with Access."

Palm also made a commitment to continue developing with the Windows Mobile system in tandem with Garnet development.

"Palm will almost certainly carry on with both operating systems," said Rachel Lashford, an analyst at Canalys.

"In order to appeal to US audiences Palm needs a Windows Mobile device to compete, and the same is true in Asia. Basically there is a hardcore of Windows users out there who must be addressed."