You’ve read the headline PalmOS and Microsoft Windows CE Neck and Neck in Sales, but the story behind the story is Gartner, Inc.’s questionable methodology.
Does anyone other than the Gartner analyst think that you can get an accurate snapshot of the handheld OS market by excluding smartphones? Doing this gives people the impression that Microsoft is making more headway against PalmSource than they actually are. Not only that, but both company’s unit sales fell versus the same period last year.
The other thing that made me scratch my head is the conclusion by some analysts that buyers are waiting for the Cobalt version of the PalmOS. Which buyers are waiting? None of the people who made the PalmOS the number one smartphone platform in the USA waited.
I don’t doubt the suggestion that more enterprise applications are being developed for Windows CE than for the PalmOS. Segmenting that part of the handheld market from what I would call the “personal productivity market” makes more sense to me than separating smartphones from non-smartphone PDAs.