Lab Notes

Michael Singer lists the five reasons he sees for Palm's descent and ultimate adoption of its rival's operating system. I'll add a sixth: it has always been a pain to develop software for Palm devices. The development tools have always been sketchy, and the runtime architecture is extremely limiting. Segmented code and limited RAM partitions practically required that applications be limited in scope. This was fine when the Palm Pilot was first introduced and its guiding principal was to have small applets that performed only one task. As competition increased among PDA makers and among Palm software vendors, applications grew and became unwieldy for developers to work with. Meanwhile, Microsoft made it simple to develop large, powerful Windows CE applications. Now here we are, with Windows Mobile (née Windows CE), finally replacing the Palm OS. As a longtime Palm user (a Treo 600 is my current device), I rue the change; as a Palm developer, I say "good riddance."