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Good-Bye Nino; Hello from Handspring
arban writes "According to this article on CNET, Philips is discontinuing the Nino, their WinCE base machine. " Phillips is citing lack of sales and consumer response to WinCE machine. On the other side of the coin, Handspring has begun taking orders from their new Palm-OS handheld. Nice and cheap.
Take a bloated, mutated, and counter-intuitive desktop operating system. Remove most of its functionality. Squeeze it into a smaller display than it was ever intended for. It's fun for a while, but ultimately unrewarding.
PalmOS Desgined from the ground up to work in a small display. You can pull it out of your pocket and get to the data in an isntant. No fuss, no mess. You wouldn't want to enter serious amounts of text in it, but it's a very practical solution for the needs of the average business person. It's massively popular.
Epoc32 A clean and elegently designed system from a company who've been building PDAs longer than anyone. Designed from day one for mobile use - but aimed at people who really need a keyboard, either because they need to process documents on the run, or because they are geeks and like being able to telnet into their linux boxes from half way up a mountain - which is when the excellent cellphone integration comes in handy. Also let's companies easily develop custom apps in OPL for, say, insurance salesmen to use on the move. Massively popular in it's niche market.
There's a pattern here, I think:
Designed to a PDA environment - people love it.
Designed from a desktop environment - complete flop.