Palm’s embrace of “developer friendly” open platform philosophy for its new handset in development, in constrast to the decidedly unfriendly sandbox approach Ap

Palm’s embrace of “developer friendly” open platform philosophy for its new handset in development, in constrast to the decidedly unfriendly sandbox approach Apple has taken, certainly must be applauded. And a flock of delighted developers are cheering them on, as indicated by the cited article discussion, as well as tech sites across the net. However, I see no reference to a factor that looms larger than software platform — quality of the hardware. Palm devices (PDA and their foray into mobile phone market space) are notorious for their unreliability and low quality. Historically, they are poorly made and break rather easily. Back when I toted a Palm PDA in my work travels, it frequently had to be replaced. And I remember giant pallets of refurbished PDAs in Fry’s Electronics, where devices would be recycled for second and subsequent deaths. Experience with Blackberry devices, I do not have, but my iPhone performance and reliability (other than on OS upgrade days) has been stellar. In fact, the iPhone is more solid that it was nearly 15 months ago. I have not even witnessed battery degradation yet on my first generation model. Yes, I realize there are iPhone lemons, but I’d assess the iPhone defect rate at a fraction of all those Palm products.