The problem is that a Palm device is like a Bic or Cricket lighter, or
even one of those lighter/torches. They ignite things or maybe can
heat something but they have a narrow function that they do extremely
well.
If you can imagine a pocket furnace, flame thrower, and toaster that
can be used for lighting cigarettes, that is sort of where Microsoft
is trying to get you to go.
Though in one sense Palm is getting it going in the other direction -
they have lots of developers and lots of small but interesting apps.
The PocketPC (or whatever they are calling it now) runs windows.
No, it doesn't come with an MP3 player. An MP3 player would have big
buttons and maybe some time and title display, but would be audio
oriented. It comes with Windows Media player, and I don't know if
they publish enough for someone to create a competing program.
You aren't going to enter Word documents with formatting, tables,
etc. on such a tiny screen. Ditto for Excel spreadsheets (Dump the
excess and you get what any of the well done Palm spreadsheets do).
And I've noted Palm plays more like an embedded environment for
development. VC++ doesn't and wouldn't work well. On any small
platform. You can get away with C++ in embedded if you are very
careful, otherwise it bloats too much.
And you can run internet explorer so you can get all those 100K pages
over your CPDP modem. If you wait long enough. Palm has web
clipping.
The problem with Windows CE is that it is still Windows. And I don't
think Microsoft will "get it" because their entire idea is "Windows in
the pocket".
OTOH, Linux embeds well, so it will be interesting to see how many
iPaqs end up running Linux and what apps are developed.
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