All of the current PDA OS's kinda suck. Palm's OS is aging, Windows CE(or whatever they're calling it this week) is a frankensteinian mishmash, and Apple suffers from Jobs control freak issues.
Honestly, I'm amazed nobody's come out with a Linux PDA, or better yet, an extremely stripped down version of XP.
There have been several linux based PDAs. One of the geeks I worked with had one in 2000 or 2001. The trick with those is finding a low cost and reliable hardware platform.
The WinCE (yet another example of poor MS marketing) OS was a kludge from the start. Ask anyone who has developed software for it for their opinion of it. Odds are it won't be favorable.
The Palm OS has stood up well over the years because of it's clean design. It's not trying to replicate a desktop OS. It was designed for data retrieval. That's its primary function. Data entry on that platform was secondary (and the original graffiti is still my favorite).
I'll expand on this more over at urbintechnology.com.
It works well in it's original application, but with the add on of Internet browsing, email clients, lite messaging, not to mention smart phone technology, Palm's OS is starting to show it's age - Palm knows this, and is developing a completely new OS, which supposedly is coming out at the end of the year.
The email client on my Palm LifeDrive works with Gmail accounts using IMAP.
The browser is definitely showing it's age. That is why I have the iPhone. It is pretty much the shit for a personal/portable web client. I'll put up with the closed Apple environment for another year or so until the g-phone matures or Palm comes out with a competitive product.
I have no plan to get the new iPhone, the hardware improvements don't strike me as worth the cost of buying a new contract.
Also, I still consider PDAs and Smart Phones to be two separate platforms. I haven't seen a Smart Phone that is a decent PDA and vice versa.
Commenting by HaloScan
