Quickies: TreoCentral, OS 5, NR70V

That would include yourself, since:

"If I want to watch a video, I'll take my portable DVD player with me. And I'll take my iPod for tunes."

Well, I want playback of DivX movies. That way, you have 1 portable device instead of 2 (or 3 if you add the mp3 player). It is possible, since the DivX people have already made a codec for the PocketPC platform. Not sure how it performs though.

I think Palm has found a very good balance of price, feature, size, battery life, power and ease of use. It will not fit everyone, but it fit a majority of users' majority needs. That is something that everyone else including MS seems to be struggling to get.

I tend to agree that OS5 doesn't seem too interesting. Partly because I still use Palm OS 3.1 (Visor Deluxe) and it works well enough for almost everything. I hope Palm doesn't run itself to the ground by taking the MS bait to introduce overly burdensome hardware/software combinations. It is a fatalistic view many non-MS companies got baited into and died trying to fight MS by their rules. And as users, we should stop thinking the way MS wants us to think: we need features, we need power, we need color, we need a super-computer (to use notepad? :)), we need high-speed wireless (to view movies on a 2x2inch screen? With 320x200 pixels?), etc. etc... True, those features are appealing to some, but those are really a minority of the population. Despite having many gadgets myself, I think those are too geeky even for me :). I know my father has 3 WinCE/PocketPC devices... but guess what, he barely knows how to use the address book, and has added zero programs to it, never used any of the PocketExcel/Word stuff, never watched movies (of course). That's quite some bit of money paid to the evil empire for lack of information. That... though... is the general population... even in Asia.

Ok. Off soap box.

Depends on who you are.... If one is in the market for a new device (whatever the reason - e.g., dropped mine...), I think it is huge.

If it delivers on it's promises, we'll see a broader range of devices, from sub-$100 to higher end machines than are possible today with PalmOS. Wider range of possible applications & uses = more market share = even more apps/innovation....

For example, would be interesting to have an iPod that included PalmOS, for example (why carry two devices? 1,000 songs or 1 Million contacts? Inkwell input, Low res digital camera.... That would be cool, and no, I have no inside sources, just thinking about potential synergy between two non-MS companies with the aboce iPod comment -)

Also, I would hope/expect compatibility with OS 6. Won't have that with non-ARM based products.

Just because Microsoft CALLS it a major upgrade, doesn't mean it is one. All PPC 2002 did was drop MIPS support and add a few bells and whistles stolen from the Palm OS. It was mostly a bug fix. And there sure were a lot of bugs to fix. They didn't do anything about the unusable UI.

That said, the Palm OS is about a year behind where it ought to be. Good thing the competition has no idea how to make a decent OS so PalmSource has time.

Also, PalmSource is going to ARM chips at exactly the right time. Microsoft made a big mistake using them when they were battery hogs. With the next generation chips, OS 5 models will have 5x the performance for the same power.