I think Peter's remarks are phrased a bit strongly for my taste, but
there's a good bit of truth to this.
Writing "real" code on the Palm is a cumbersome nightmare. There's no way
around it. Of *course* a "good" C programmer can do it; a good C programmer
can do anything. The question isn't whether it's impossible, but how
cumbersome it is, and therefore how much high-quality code gets turned out
and what that code does.
I've written a *lot* of enterprise Palm code in the last year. It must be
admitted that that biases my point of view, but I think that the next few
years will reveal an enormous demand for enterprise-capable handheld
platforms.
I think that as people wake up to the demand for this kind of stuff, and as
handhelds become more ubiquitous, we're going to see a demand for more real
applications and less personal organizer type of stuff. As networking stuff
becomes more prevalent, the same is likely to happen -- Bluetooth, wireless
TCP/IP over CDMA, etc.
I can't imagine that in a few years, people aren't going to want to be able
to download MP3s, view maps dynamically, etc. on a handheld computer, and
the Palm architecture right now is *not* scalable. I mean that in terms of
hardware and software, and any steps Palm takes are in the right direction,
as far as I'm concerned.
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palm.com/devzone/mailinglists.html
