One interesting thing to point out here:
Since Palm announced it was acquiring Be, I've spent quite a bit of time
looking at the BeOS since presumably much of it will show up in some form or
another in future versions of PalmOS. In a nutshell:
* BeOS is much cleaner and easier to code (than CE)
* BeOS has much better "media handling"
* BeOS (like PalmOS) makes excellent use of available hardware, compared to
Windows
IMO, it will be interesting to see how a PalmOS/BeOS system running on a
206mhz StrongARM compares to a WinCE device running on the same hardware. I
generally agree that people like the "geewhiz" features more easily
available (at the moment) on CE: sound, high(er) rez and larger screens
(yeah, I know HandEra and Sony have em too), color, movies on a PDA,
wireless LANs, but that's all novelty right now. Battery life and speed of
applications on the device is huge. If an iPAQ is about as responsive as a
Palm, but has a processor that is an order of magnitude faster than current
PalmOS devices, imagine what can be done by a PalmOS device running
comperable processor technology . . . yum.
Also, iPAQs have the PC Card sleeve . . . but the sleeve has it's own
battery that has to be charged separately. W/o the extra battery, the
battery life w/ a wireless LAN card is very poor. Battery life matters.
In short, I agree that the general perception is that CE is trumping Palm,
but when you look at the Be acquisition and what Palm and its licensees have
in the pipeline, I think things look rather promising.
Cheers,
-DGA
Another thought: As an enterprise developer, having POSE really makes life
great. Using gremlins to test stability and memory leaking gives Palm
developers and applications an edge in stability. Random unexplained
crashes (and data loss) are bad.
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