[mcc97]

Palm OS has a much larger developer community, than for Windows. Microsoft has found a way to get the Palm developers to jump ship. Already an email was sent to the Palm developers to see if they want "to take advantage of this collaboration, to expand your solution to Windows Mobile".

Once Microsoft platform gets the applications, which are only available on the Palm OS, then the Palm OS will be dead.

I think it was a very bad move by Palm. Now that Windows Mobile 5, has included support for square windows, there are going to be a dozen smart phones that look like the Treo. They are going to have stiff competition and Palm will not be able to charge those ridiculous prices, and make those large profits. Palm is a company which does not even make it's own hardware, someone else does it. They did not even design the Treo, it was done by Handspring (Handspring Treo 600). They are going to get smoked by the competition.

[ronbo2000]

<moved>

[Scott R]

Apps can't be ported by simply dragging and dropping them into a new IDE. I will tell you, though, that programming for WM devices via .NET has some very nice features, including exposing APIs for picture taking, making phone calls, etc. This is the big problem with the Palm OS. On the Palm OS, a developer needs to access these sorts of "advanced functionality" via specific APIs exposed by a specific hardware licensee. On a WM device, a lot of this is common across all licensees.

I should note that while I recently obtained the beta of the upcoming Visual Studio .NET 2005 tools, I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, so I'm not sure of the quality of the end product. I'm hoping to throw together a simple applet within the next day or so to test it out.