I'm looking at palm/palmos dies slowly. They was the leader once, now
they are back in the list, MS on the top. It's not about the hardware, I
think Palm has made better handhelds than most ppcs I have seen, but
it's about the software/os. Having only the free gcc and highly priced
CW discouraged lot of people, the poor OS with lot of problems, the need
to do stupid things in order to get so simple things working (yeah, I'm
reffering to the TONS of hacks, system pathing, arm+68k code, direct
register access, the memory segment limits, etc, etc...) just drove
people away from it.
Then Palm started randomly moving from one solution to another - the
jump from OS4 to OS5 which was rather incompatible, the pace objects,
the native arm programs, the non existing OS6, the linux, the wince...
Hell there is no even a single dev tool that is worth for palmos! Except
the dead now codewarrior. PODS is just too funny and even after so much
time it still looks and works like a fast put together demo program.
I have seen a big shift in the customers too, an year ago nobody
mentioned PPC, while now I can't convince them to use palm. Palm should
finally decide which one to bet and stop jumping around. Be linux - I'm
okay with it, I have seen it working on some device, function rich,
opensource, lot of people dedicated to it, free compilers, programs,
etc. Or be wince - good dev tools from MS, integrated sql, lot of apps
that you need to buy in the palm world..., I just want Palm to select
one and go on with it, I'm just tired of incompatibilities, just want to
see at least 2 years ahead and to know that palm will not "invent" the
next stupid thing that will break the existing ones.
Just my 0.02$
PS: Don't get me wrong, I like Palm and want to continue working with
it, but they just force the developers and the customers to go find
other solutions.
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