iPhone vs PalmOS (Score 1)

It's interesting to look at the history of PalmOS and see where they ended up. Sure PalmOS was a fairly open platform, however applications were essentially unable create OS level threads (due to kernel licensing restrictions) and the only way to do 'background' processing was through various awful event driven kludges and hacks. Imho this killed the OS as a useful platform for really serious application development in it's later years. Once CPU power/screen resolution/colour depth and memory was no longer a real issue, the inability to create decent, consistently well behaved multi-threaded apps meant PalmOS stagnated while competitors like Windows Mobile over took them. This is also why I believe Symbian (and it's awful cooperative multi-tasking Active Object scheme) is doomed in the long term. Hard to believe Apple think limiting their iPhone in the same way is a good idea...