There has been a lot of discussion in the trade press and in industry conferences on strategic choice of OS platform for PDAs. PalmOS, Symbian's  EPOC and Pocket PC are all vying for maintaining or capturing the leadership role. There are some strong views depending on the self-interests of the group or analysts expressing these views. Situation and trends are changing fast. Requirements of the OS have changed with convergence of devices and with the desire of consumers to carry only one device. Dominance of PalmOS has suffered from 1999 to now (April 2002). We are  bringing the attention of professionals to the following opinions expressed by analysts and our analysis of these opinions.

We have seen and you must have seen too presentations from Palm, Symbian and Microsoft emphasizing the superiority of their own operating systems and devices based on these OSes. Until late 2000, PalmOS and devices based on these monopolized the market so long as you wanted the device to be an organizer and handle simple business applications. Earlier versions of PalmOS did not have the power, flexibility, versatility and support for powerful new processors coming down the Intel pipeline, accessories and wireless networks. Meanwhile, Microsoft with much greater R&D arsenal and software engineering experience, kept on improving its Windows CE and soon Pocket PC became a formidable opponent. Palm as a company had difficult time with senior executives leaving to form Handspring and 3COM as the corporate parent did not know how to bring this special child called PalmOS. Palm could not easily shake its preoccupation with consumer market and steer itself into the enterprise. 

As the Palm organizer tried to become an e-mail device trying to copy RIM's Blackberry, it failed miserably. Palm VII did not succeed the way to unseat Blackberry. Handspring created better PalmOS devices and enhanced the device with unique implementation of the extra expansion card that gave birth to Visor phone.

By the middle of 2001, some analysts started talking of the demise of Palm - merger of Palm and handspring was rumored too. We never thought that Palm was in such serious trouble. Palm was sick and weak but it had enough well-wishers that it would not die. In fact, steps taken in late 2001 have given it enough strength that we feel its future is assured for some time. Announcement of Palm Os 5.0, its acquisition of ThinAir Apps and redirection to win the heart of enterprise IT professionals did give Palm some respect. 

We would like to summarize some opinions and views that we would like you to consider in making device decisions.

1. Palm devices continue to have a larger % share of the PDA market than any other device or OS (please do not include smart phones that do not have equivalent function or device real-estate - let us compare apples with apples) even today. Having said that, we should also recognize that unless you are Microsoft monopoly, your % market share will go down after a few years of landslide success. Therefore, what we see today is nothing but natural business and economic phenomenon. As a result, our projection is that PalmOS devices will continue to be the dominant OS for its own class of PDAs for at least a couple of years. At the same time, its market share as a percentage will continue to decline as Pocket PC gains ground, Symbian-based smart phones (we repeat, only those smart phones that have equivalent function, power and real estate that they can handle enterprise applications) gain more adoption and Blackberry 5810 (with GPRS phone capability) intrudes further in this market. 

2. All this discussion about the dominance of PalmOS, Symbian and Blackberry is of interest only to market watchers, investors and those who write about it including the writer of this page. It has only limited value to IT professionals who must select devices or write business applications for a given device and OS. Most likely scenario (in our estimation with better than 70% reliability) is that the three OSes (PalmOS, Symbian EPOC, Pocket PC) will survive for another three to five years.  When you are selecting a device for your business application or for distributing it to the professionals in your organization, the relative market share of devices OS should not be the over-riding consideration. Far more important consideration should be the matching of what your user want to do with the capability of the solution, what type of user interface you can design with the chosen device and life expectancy of the application. Those who are still hung up with the OS should pause for a moment to ask if we worry about the OS of the TV set or other devices that we buy for our pleasure. The analogy is not perfect but does give us a perspective.

3. For those who are sticklers of how good Palm's i705 device in matching Blackberry in terms of email, we should perhaps remind them of a very good paper written by Carl Zetie, VP of Mobile Research at Giga in a recent issue of Information week. You must take a balanced and holistic view of everything. If all you need to do is wireless e-mail, do not consider i705 because Blackberry does it better than anything else. If on the other hand, besides e-mail you want to do a few among thousands of PalmOS applications, then you should consider Palm's i705.

4. Price of PalmOS devices is generally lower than that of Pocket PC devices. However, for enterprise deployment, price of the handheld device is only one component (contributing to anywhere from 15 to 25% of operating cost) of the total solution deployment prices. Minor difference of $100-150 between one category of device versus another is not so important, if you can get much greater value and acceptance by the field force. Therefore, you should consider the total cost of ownership that includes application development, support and management cost. 

For more information:  Do a keyword search on our site with PalmOS and Pocket PC as keywords.

• Go to MobileInfo.Com's comments and opinion regarding choice of platform for wireless games

• Go to ZDNET site - Palm versus Pocket PC 

• Go to Microsoft Site - Report by Dale Coffing