"But Palm needs to be able to promise good news on the horizon, to tide it over what it sees as a bad spot"

...A bad spot which is likely to exisist until

a) The company gets bought by someone else and disappears

b) The company goes under and disappears

It;s a pity I used to long for a 3 or a 5 series. Then when I finally had enough money to buy one everybody else had coloured graphic sand the likes and there was no way I was buying several year old tech from palm. Sad to see what has happened to them and their now overpriced and underperforming products.

I have a Palm Treo and I wouldn't be without it. I also have a Windows Mobile 5 platform that constantly needs rebooting and seems to eat battery life.

I'd be happy to part with my money for another Palm running Palm O/S but not a Windows platform. That's the move that hurt Palm's business.

I'd sooner switch to a plain phone and a pad of paper before I'd use anything with Windows Mobile.

There seems to be no chance of a CDMA iPhone, and none of the carriers in my area carry anything Symbian either. Hell, even a free iPhone couldn't get me to switch to the only GSM provider here in Canada.

That leaves Blackberry and Palm. And I'll choose a Palm over a locked down Blackberry any day.

I have always been a major fan of Palm since my original Pilot and at present have a Treo 650.

Unfortunately for Palm as soon as they started mucking around with Windows Mobile I started looking elsewhere.

I loved the fact that every time I have updated my Palms I have just pressed the Sync button and all of my address book has moved onwards and upwards.

Making this complicated with conversion programs just makes me think of looking around at all the competition. I have played with various Windows Mobile devices and am not yet impressed. I bought a Nokia N95 as a second phone but though reliable it is so slow compared to the Treo, mind you all the other bits like brilliant camera, GPS, WIFI are really nice.

I think Nokia are looking favourite at the moment to take over the Palm mantle. Real shame though.

I have been using PalmOS since IIIx came out, my last PalmOS device was a Treo 650.

Recently I had to ditch it, and went for a slim, light and hassle-free LG dumbphone, accompanied with a PPC PDA(no phone) brick which has bluetooth, wifi and a keyboard which I could carry around or leave at home as needed. Yes, so I joined the dark side. PPC interface is a bit painful after the fast and clean PalmOS UI, but it works. Since it is not my phone, the interaction speed (number of taps/button presses to do something) is not important anymore. And now I can browse with Opera Mobile while downloading mail in the background, and have a PIM app open in the background.

Reasons? I now use a x64 Windows system, for which Palm still has not released a simple USB driver for hotsync. Lack of multitasking was getting to me. There was no wifi, and no plans for one. And frankly all the workarounds for SDcard access, decent call volume etc were getting to me. Occasional resets were annoying too.

If and when Palm releases a new version of its OS I may reconsider (and I expect by that time the Android etc may be a better choice). Until then I am taking my business elsewhere.