And the two become one

[Andy Sjostrom]

<a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,431809,00.asp">http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,431809,00.asp</a><br /><br />The article "Targeting the PDA" discusses the convergence aspects of bringing the PDA and phone worlds closer. The article is quite interesting, even though its main focus seems to be on the challenges Palm faces in this market. Personally, I feel that Palm has very little to offer in this middle ground. Honestly, the best advice anyone can give Palm is to not get in the way of initiatives that giants Symbian and Microsoft are cooking up.<br /><br />"But Microsoft's latest handheld operating system, Pocket PC Phone Edition, may be a more immediate threat. It gives licensees one more way to give traditional PDAs wireless capabilities and customers such as Christopher Bell another reason to believe switching from Palm to Pocket PC was the right decision. ... "I was ready for better Windows integration and a new programming challenge," said Bell, chief technology officer of the People2People Group, in Boston, who switched from Palm to Pocket PC a few months ago."

[jdhill]

The article indicates that of the three main handheld OS's, Symbian and Pocket PC are more suited to the Phone/PDA or PDA/Phone than Palm OS.

I agree. Even though we have seen a number of Palm OS based phones, the 'keep it simple' philosophy of the Palm OS is not conducive to integrating phone functions, especially when multi-tasking is needed. Perhaps Palm OS 5 will be better in this regard.

But for now, give me an OS with multi-tasking, a real e-mail client, a real web browser, etc. for my convergence device. Palm OS was desgined as an organizer OS. It's a great organizer OS. When you go beyond the simple stuff, that's were it falls behind.