Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by macspoofing on Monday February 18, 2013 @09:37PM (#5242273)

Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.

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Re:Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations by edderly on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @02:10AM (#5243076)

Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.

However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.

The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.

IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0

Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.

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