[Possum Roadkill]

It's odd. PPC's are standardized more in some ways and less in others. My edit commands like cut, copy, and paste keep showing up in different places on different programs. Some programs have an edit menu with the commands, some have a menu that is not called edit with the commands and some have the commands on the tap and hold contextual menus.

The problem with Palm goes beyond standardization. I think it has more to do with the quality of hardware they are selling and how they seem to drag their feet with technological advances. The reason Palm let Sony use their own I/O for expansion cards, is because they didn't have anything themselves ready to be released yet. Sony released higher resolution screens, epansion cards, and better audio first. They had to write the code for this themselves because it didn't exist in the Palm OS yet. If they had been blocked from being able to do this then they also would have been prevented from releasing any of these new improvements.

[Possum Roadkill]

It's odd. PPC's are standardized more in some ways and less in others. My edit commands like cut, copy, and paste keep showing up in different places on different programs. Some programs have an edit menu with the commands, some have a menu that is not called edit with the commands and some have the commands on the tap and hold contextual menus.

The problem with Palm goes beyond standardization. I think it has more to do with the quality of hardware they are selling and how they seem to drag their feet with technological advances. The reason Palm let Sony use their own I/O for expansion cards, is because they didn't have anything themselves ready to be released yet. Sony released higher resolution screens, epansion cards, and better audio first. They had to write the code for this themselves because it didn't exist in the Palm OS yet. If they had been blocked from being able to do this then they also would have been prevented from releasing any of these new improvements.

[alabij]

I chose to switch to PPC/WM just because I liked the GUI. MS is good at that, good GUI, crappy organs. I wouldn't switch back to a palm device but I still don't think MS has fully gained the lead with the PPC.
The upgradeability issue with the pocket pcs is a big turn off. The OEM's have just too much power with regards to PPC's. They determine who lives and who dies.
Also up till date there are more free palm apps than ppc apps.
Remember, the palm business model is based on simplicity. No crashes, lockups or hard resets. Yeah the PPC is sophisticated with its multi tasking but which one of us here trust our pocket pcs with our data 99%(not 100 because no device works 100%)

[surur]

Here's two graphs charting the ascendancy of windows mobile.





That big spike in 2000 was the tech bubble. Palm will never have it as good as they had it then.

As you can see, WM passed POS shipments in 2004, and currently ships almost twice as many units as POS.

You can also see that it has been PPC's which has been growing the market for a while now, and Palm is slowly sinking away, even in absolute numbers. These graph (of Canalys numbers largely) include Treo's BTW.

BTW, new Palms are horribly unstable, much more so than new Pocketpc's.

http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90438

Surur

[cteel2004]

Both Microsoft and Palm try to offer alot of flexibility to their customers.

The problem for Palm is that they see the OEM's (such as Sony) as their customers, whereas Microsoft sees the end users as their customers.

[WyattEarp]

Originally Posted by Foo Fighter

Uh...I thought the point of this story is that Microsoft does dominate that sector of the market.

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

[i]"Microsoft will never dominate handheld computers"

Just making a point of what the article said not a conclusion.