I don't know the answer to your question, but I know the answer to mine. (hint: It's yes)

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What is infuriating is how people like yourself bitch and moan about the features that aren't there. And then when they do add them, you bitch and moan about how they should have been there from the beginning.

They are there now (or will be this summer), but you're still not happy?

I suppose Apple could have followed Palm's business model and waited until 2009 to launch the device......

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Palm is not worrying about Apple, not does Apple need to worry about Palm. People who want glitz will keep their iPhones, and people who want sheer processor power and a solid real-world interface will choose Palm Pre, or an Android option. It's a pretty simple split that will probably work well.

It's irksome that iPhone fanboys don't know where their iPhone has its roots though. Apple didn't know anything about PDAs until Palm showed the world how it was done. Recall, Apple tried to make a PDA and failed miserably and didn't bother again. They sat back for many years seeing where Palm, Handspring and Windows Mobile worked and they cobbled together a device with mediocre hardware that just squeaks by on its looks, given that it has little processor power.

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Moron.

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Palm was the only real survivor of that crash. The saw the immediate and long-term benefit of developing for the smartphone market with a system that was already robust and widely supported. WebOS is a completely new OS, and while it won't havenative backwards compatibility, there are already several signs of a third-party PalmOS emulator, which will likely run faster than most PalmOS devices. PalmOS base dphone still have a good, if narrow, marketshare and it's widely expected that WebOS will likely quadruple that share, snagging many WinMo users, (and some iPhone early-adopters who skipped the 3G update and will be ready to jump on the release of the Pre ).

That would put Palm solidly in even marketshare with iPhone whose current dominance is fair, but slipping. In Q4 they suffered considerable marketshare loss versus RIM (falling by almost 10% while RIM increased by more than 7%, and sales Q4 2008 dropped by nearly 30%.

Palm has never been considered a failure, in any sense, though like other handheld device companies, has had to redefine the way it did business. Even Windows handhelds died out as they migrated and evolved into smartphone devices.

Apple was very prescient with the Newton, but at the time were not capable of manufacturing hardware and were unable to provide a robust enough device with Sharp's assistance, and it was far too expensive for a world who didn't know what they could do with it (which wasn't much). The iPhone may be suffering the same definition and niche problem. While an intriguing device, for sure, its considerable drop in sales and marketshare may be a sign that it is unable to carve a solid niche and define itself to a specific market. It seems to lack business credibility which makes it a tough proposition for enterprise level deployment. So far, it's been heavily criticized as a failure for enterprise solutions because it lacks a keyboard, removable battery and is too tightly and inextricably bound to Apple in every way. That will hurt longterm adoption, whereas the WinMo and WebOS solutions will continue to do well there.

So, no, I'm neither an idiot nor a moron. I'm well aware of the history of handheld computing and its evolution to smartphone computing.

Would that you could say the same your argument may have consisted of more than shouting childish fanboyisms in all caps.

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