Palm's Creativity vs. Windows' Compatibility

Michael Gartenberg | December 03, 2003, 10:42 AM

Interesting comments from PocketPC Thoughts on a BizWeek article. There's clearly a balance and a shift going on here. In 04, we are likely to see the first PocketPCs that break the traditional constraints of those devices (and also introducing flux into the marketplace in terms of software support) and PalmSource taking a greater lead in setting standards so that there aren't three different APIs that developers need to support for a given feature. Overall, this is good news as device vendors will be free to differentiate products in hardware to offer better choices to users but at the same time ISVs won't be locked out of different devices because they didn't support some proprietary standard.

"While Palms are evolving into new and intriguing shapes, handhelds using rival Microsoft's Pocket PC software seem stuck in a rut. There are dozens of strikingly similar Pocket PCs that basically come in two flavors: those that double as phones and those that don't. The result is that consumers looking for the most innovative products are going to find a lot more to choose from in the world of Palms. For example, the first Pocket PCs with built-in keyboards are just starting to appear -- two years later than in Palm-based products...There's a downside to all this creativity in Palmland. A game created for the zodiac won't run on any other product, in part because Tapwave uses a unique, PC-like video adapter to get maximum performance in action games. Garmin modified the operating system itself, a step Microsoft would never allow, to get better GPS performance. "It's slightly chaotic in the short run," says PalmSource CEO David Nagel. But, he adds, everyone benefits when individual licensees' improvements are rolled into the next version of the PalmSource software."

 

via [Pocket PC Thoughts]

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/03_49/b3861037.htm?mz