Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and

Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables. The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management. Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking. It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)