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Originally Posted by Laurens
Looks I was completely off the mark earlier. Using Linux would definitely make sense from a business perspective.
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I hope they can succeed where every single other Linux-based handheld device has failed over the last 5 years.
There is currently no OS that has the simplicity, structure and syncronization capabilities of PalmOS in the Linux environment, so they'll have to recreate something from scratch, or make some serious modifications to something that might be close.
Whatever they create will most-likely
not be licensed under a Free Software or Open Source license also, which might severely limit adoption and third-party support on that offering.
Unless whatever Linux-based handheld they can come up with (assuming they do) has the ability to sync directly to existing PalmOS handhelds and Palm desktops (both the Linux Palm Desktop flavors and the Windows Palm Desktop components), then it will fail.
This is something I've always found a bit odd... the are over 100 Linux-based handheld devices on the market, and every single one of them that is sold commercially, ships with software to syncronize to Windows, but almost none of them ship with software to syncronize to Linux itself.
If a user of a PalmOS handheld can't migrate from one to the other, transparently, without losing any of his data or data references, then the whole thing is irrelevant.
I can speak directly to this issue with authority, because most of my daily "paid" work is centered around embedded Linux on portable and mobile devices, and I also maintain
the defacto software package that is used to syncronize PalmOS handhelds in Linux, FreeBSD, and other POSIX platforms (in fact, we support more PalmOS handhelds than pa1mOne, Palm, Sony, and all others combined).
Just because it
can run Linux, doesn't always mean it
should run Linux. There are reasons for, and against each side of that argument.