Most of you probably already read Sagio’s report-the Windows Mobile Treo will be accompanied by a PalmOS cousin. Immediately, the PIC went bonkers…. and forgot Mike Cane’s editorial about operating systems(act of shameless self promotion: and my answer).
Indeed, I would not really wonder if the Windows Mobile and PalmOS powered handhelds would share the same planar. Actually, nowadays, with all three/four major handheld platforms running on the very same architecture, discussions about the OS are pointless. All the developer/licencee needs to do is get a Platform Builder for the OS he desires-burn the bin file into a ROM and the party is started.
Because of the extremely small effort involved, the idea of Palm releasing a Windows Mobile or even Linux handheld is not as far-fetched as some think. The R&D costs would be about zero for sure. In fact, it is very possible that a few prototypes of a Treo running Symbian exist. Other (reliable, ex-employee) sources rumored that Tapwave had Linux running on Zodiacs shortly before close-up. Actually, we could even see a few determined users porting Windows CE over to one of the old PalmOS handhelds with true RAM-I beleive that NVFS limits interoperatibility quite a bit.
If we continue to think along this track, we will soon see that Palm’s devices for WinCE and Palm OS probably will be very similar and may even appear simultaneously. Why should the wheel be reinvented?
What do you think?
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