Be Ships BeOS Preview Release 2

RELEASED OCTOBER 7, 1997

For more information contact

In the U.S. and Pacific:
Alex Osadzinski, alex@be.com
+1 (650) 462-4126

In Europe:
Jean Calmon, jcalmon@beeurope.com
(33) 1 49 06 73 75

BE SHIPS BeOS PREVIEW RELEASE 2
FOUR MONTHS AFTER PREVIEW RELEASE 1

MENLO PARK, Calif. (October 7, 1997) -- Today Be., Inc. announced shipment of the second public release of the Be Operating System (BeOS Preview Release 2). Preview Release 2 continues improvements resulting from Developer and End-user feedback with features added as part of the long term development plan for the BeOS.

"This release adds momentum to the BeOS," said Jean-Louis Gassée, President and CEO of Be, Inc. "This is business as usual, responding to Developers and Customers and building up the BeOS technology platform."

In just the last two months:

• Over one hundred new BeOS applications have been released
• The number of registered Be developers has climbed 10% to more than 4,400
• More than 500,000 copies of the BeOS have been distributed to potential users.

Be plans to deliver three releases of the BeOS next year, and the BeOS Preview Release 2 is actually being delivered slightly ahead of that schedule: less than four months after Preview Release 1. The improvements made in Preview Release 2 primarily focus on application accessibility, usability, and stability.

Application Accessibility

The BeOS Preview Release 2 CD comes with nearly 40 3rd party applications currently available for the BeOS. These include: word processing, spreadsheet, audio, Internet, entertainment, graphics, and developer applications.

Usability

The BeOS Release 2 offers increased hardware support, user interface improvements, and application and performance enhancements. Some of the additions are:

• Hardware support
  • the ability to read from and write to Mac HFS partitions
  • support for systems with up to 512 MB of RAM
  • support for fixed-sync monitors

• User interface improvements
  • double-click installation of compressed archives (.zip, .gz, ...)
  • editing of saved queries
  • live updating of Tracker window columns
  • increased keyboard navigation

• Application features
  • BeMail's People application supports e-mail addresses
  • the built-in web browser (NetPositive) supports page updating
  • NetPositive launches other apps to handle other types of files

• Other changes
  • broader POSIX compliance
  • faster TCP/IP networking

Stability

The BeOS is designed for digital content creation markets where system stability and up-time are extremely important. A great deal of work has gone into extensive system reliability testing. The protected memory design of the BeOS fundamentally improves up-time because even if one application fails, only that application needs to be relaunched rather than the whole system. Preview Release 2 up-time is measured in months not hours or days.

Availability & Pricing

The BeOS Preview Release 2 will begin shipping on October 20, 1997. Advance online orders will be taken starting on October 7th on Be's web site . Pricing remains the same:

• $49.95 for the retail package which includes a printed user's guide and the next two releases, on supported hardware, for free.

• $9.95 for the trial package which includes electronic documentation and no future releases.

Customers who purchased the BeOS Preview Release Retail Package are entitled to the next two releases, on supported hardware, for free. These customers will be sent Preview Release 2 CD (as one of the free releases) in the mail starting on October 20th. Customers who purchased the BeOS Preview Release after September 1st will be sent the BeOS Preview Release 2 CD without this version counting against their two free releases.

Registered Be developers will be sent the Preview Release 2 starting on October 20th. A Web downloadable version of BeOS Preview Release 2 is expected to be available in November from Be's website, .

Future Releases

BeOS Release 3 is expected in Q1 1998 and will be the first commercial release to support both Intel Architecture and PowerPC systems. While the main thrust for Release 3 is support for Intel Architecture machines, it will also feature a number of other enhancements including significant performance boosts with support for 3D hardware acceleration and 100 Megabit Ethernet.

About Be

Be, Inc., founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée, is a software company focusing on building new foundations for the next generation of digital content and media design tools. With a team of industry-leading engineers and business executives in the United States and Europe, the company is dedicated to removing the limitations of existing computer architectures and delivering a new level of price performance.

In 1997, Be is publishing the first public releases of the Be Operating System (BeOS), the core product of this strategy. Additional information on Be and the BeOS is available online at http://www.be.com/. Be, Inc. is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.