On 01/17/2009 Craig Froehle wrote: > Palm was the original pinnacle of usability in the handheld space. The "Zen > of Palm" was simple > and fast = powerful. Most of Palm's own apps still follow this credo. The > fact that the OS is less > that ideally stable is a result of years of adding on to a core that was > never meant to accommodate > such evolution. The iPhone is a non-technical device for non-technical > people. You may understand > how it works, but you can't change/control it nearly to the degree that > coders have been tweaking > Palm devices for well over a decade.
Good points, except iPhones are highly technical devices. The target is not so much non-technical users so much as users who are happy with out of the box interfaces and features. In a continuum, Apple products tend to be less customizable than MS products which are less customizable than OSS/Linux products. I'd say the Palm OS falls somewhere between MS products and Linux. Apple's defenders will argue that the relatively closed nature of OSX (and the iPhone runs a light version of OSX) accounts for its relative stability over Windows, and all criticisms aside, my iTouch is far more stable than my Centro. Others, including Treo fans, prefer to live with a bit more instability in exchange for flexibility.
