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Originally Posted by ballistic
IMO, the T5, and to a greater extent Cobalt, are remaining true to the Zen of Palm Philopsophy, retaining elegance and simplicity while at the same time stretching the sweet spot
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You are absolutely right. However, from a technical standpoint OS5 and earlier make it difficult to develop advanced applications. Even though you are running ARM hardware, the Palm OS itself (prior to OS6) has significant limitations. Essentially, you're still compiling against the Motorola 68K instruction set and not taking full advantage of the ARM processor. (I won't bore people with the technical details.) Anyway, this is why applications like Skype are not available for PalmOS. Developing such an application for PalmOS is much harder than it is for WinCE.
It's not just Microsoft's marketing machine that is making PPC more popular. Developing database applications (important for businesses) is far easier under WinCE as MS thought of building in database functionality from the start. (PalmOS only has a very crude concept of a "database".) GPS navigation programs like TomTom navigator were first released for PPC. I'll mention Skype again. (I could go on for a while.)
Now Cobalt is the chance for PalmOS to get back in the game. It makes some programming tasks far easier and thus makes it feasible to develop advanced applications within a reasonable time and budget. If this is coupled with the ease-of-use and stability of prior versions then PalmOS definitely stands a chance to succeed. But only if actual Cobalt devices appear very soon, as the window of opportunity is rapidly closing. Until then, there's no real incentive for developers to dedicate time and money in developing programs for a platform that, for all intents and purposes, is still vapourware.
Anyway, this is just one developer's perspective on things. As a company, PalmOne is still doing reasonably well and they're in better shape than they were a year ago.