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"PalmOS ... is dying"

You might want to check that out:

"ACCESS to Extend Leadership in Mobile Device Software with Acquisition of PalmSource" (http://www.access.co.jp/english/press/050909.html )

"Palm and Microsoft Join to Bring the Palm Experience to Windows Mobile"
(http://www.palm.com/us/company/pr/news_feed_story .epl?reqid=760974)

Palm OS's biggest user, Palm (formerly PalmOne), just switched their flagship product to Palm OS. And PalmSource just got purchased by ACCESS, a company known for their embedded web browser.

Palm OS as we know it is dead.

"TiVo is dying"

Yes, they are. Their partnership with DIRECTV essentially ended when DIRECTV was purchased by News Corp (which owns NDS who already has a PVR solution); the D20 and other upcoming DIRECTV PVRs are based on NDS technology, not TiVo. As for cable companies, their only major deal has been with Comcast, and right now it looks like they won't even have product available until well into 2006. Comcast also already has their own PVR solution, and is already testing a Microsoft TV Foundation PVR, so TiVo probably isn't getting much in the way of royalties from the Comcast deal.

What is TiVo's competitive advantage over integrated PVRs? Yes, their software is better, but most people would rather have a lame integrated PVR than have to deal with the hassle of an IR changer cable.

WinCE\WindMobile devices like the iPAQ had them but they were difficult to configure (type a 28 character WEP key in by hand with a stylus?!?!). And once you got them configured, what to use them for except surfing the net.

You can browse shared folders from your iPaq. I've even played MP3's from my hard drive on my desktop over the network.

I would love to run full JVM (or at least a stripped down version that is customizable) on a PDA.

A company called Access makes JV-Lite 2 which comes with their Netfront browser, which is far better than using pocket IE...

I'm sure they'll get to a PPC port. But I currently use NetFront on my iPAQ, and that'll take some beating. The "Smart-Fit" page rendering does an amazing job of reformatting pages to be readable on the small screen. Plus tabbed browsing, very high degree of "big browser" compatibility, and a JVM for good measure. NetFront ain't free though, so a decent PPC version of Minimo would be velcome.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

We've got Links, Dillo, and we could probably get Gecko working within reasonable constraints. We have commercial products on our side such as Netfront, Opera. If you're talking QNX, you've also got Voyager. So yeah, Windows, 0, the other guys, 1.

NetFront is just a web browser for appliances. English info here
Access also makes the cHTML browser behind NTT-Docomo's popular i-mode phones.