Simple vs. Bloated
A recent article in The Economist about the battle between Microsoft and Nokia for operating system supremacy on wireless instruments (Smartphones) concluded that Nokia with its Symbian OS based Series 60 SDK was already the victor over Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 SDK [...] The reason given for the Nokia victory was the 'fear of Microsoft' extending their hegemony to the mobile device market.
Actually, IT Analysis thinks that the real reason is more simply that "Pocket PC is still a bloated OS for a portable device by any measurement":
Can anyone introduce me to a PDA user who regularly edits Excel and Word files on their PDA?
Indeed. It's refreshing to see that consumers may have a preference for things that just do what they need to do vs. techies' dreams that are full of promises but don't deliver. This is the reason why Palm, a ridiculous company compared to Microsoft by any financial standards and marketing muscles, and its Palm OS licensees are still leading the PDA market with rather simple but efficient products. Being a long time Unix fan, there is no mystery why I prefer the "do one thing but do it well" approach of the Palm OS-like smartphones as opposed to the "stuff-Windows-in-everything" approach in Microsoft's Pocket PC.
I have yet to find a reason why I would need Office or even Windows on a smartphone. And I don't dig into fatal error messages in the middle of phone calls:
Using one of the first versions of a Microsoft smartphone, after several unsuccessful attempts to use it to make a phone call, we got a dialog box that said, simply, "Nothing beyond".
