Sorry.

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Although Apple made an early debut with the Newton, it was an total flop. Too big, not versatile enough and hardly accessible for programmers to develop applications for.

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Adrian; you forget (or maybe you're just too young to remember) that Palm practically invented the smartphone category. And that was after they defined the PDA category. From the early days of Palm OS the Treo 180, Palm (Handspring) was at the forefront of the development of the smart phone. And in those days, the smart phone pretty much meant the combination of a PDA with phone functionality, since there really wasn't mobile data to speak of. Then the Treo 600 came on the scene and it was pretty much the first smart phone blockbuster. It was the device to have at the time, and it was very good at what it did. Microsoft didn't really catch up until years later. And Blackberry? At the time Blackberry device was just starting to introduce phone features - and you couldn't even hold it up to your head and use it like a phone, you had to use a headset or it wouldn't work.

The Treo 600 was sadly Palm's pinnacle, and it was downhill for the company from there as the company went through a couple of stupid transitions and kept pumping out the same hardware, letting their new OS development languish. And while Palm was distracted other companies were eating Palm's lunch.

Yes, the Palm OS 5 ultimately doesn't stand up to today's standards, especially when it comes to multimedia and internet applications, but as we give it final rights, let's not forget what the OS has done. We shouldn't minimize its contribution to computing, especially to smart phones.

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