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Alex Kac - CEO/Founder 
A few years ago Palm was at the top of its game and had thousands of applications. But quickly developers started leaving and going to the more stable Windows Mobile. It had little to do with the operating system or zen of Palm or whatever. It had to do with the fact that the OS was becoming fragmented and becoming difficult to deal with as each device that came out broke this or that. You no longer were writing software for the Palm, but instead for the Palm Zire, or the III or whatnot. Each device had a custom PalmOS that required some custom coding for.
Mostly due to HTC, Windows Mobile is slowly going that same way. In the past we could write to the Windows Mobile spec and mostly everything worked on any device. Now HTC is doing so much custom stuff and breaking so many things its ridiculous. Palm is no better. They write their add-on software without regard to third party developers. They take customizable registry entries and turn them into static ones. They break APIs. They provide broken drivers. The list goes on.
Of late I've had things that worked for hundreds of devices stop working for just one because that OEM simply did a poor job. Here are some recent examples:
1) Motorola Q. SMS API hard freezes device. This is the main reason FlexMail had to move to using MAPI to send its SMS. Of course....
2) Palm Treo 750v. Palm introduces a great new threaded SMS. In the process they break MAPI SMS sending from third party apps.
3) (New) HTC Diamond. For years we've had the same code for reading Contact pictures. We get the image stream, draw it to a bitmap (for caching) then draw it on screen. Worked fine. HTC Diamond breaks this. We're testing some new code to see if we can fix this.
4) Dell Axim 50v. Drivers are broken for offscreen gradient functions. This is a straight GDI function!
5) All HTC devices with TouchFlo - no configuration to work with default applications
6) HP iPaq 21x and 11x devices. Drivers for storage (both main and SD/CF) corrupt data. Of course this also affects the built in apps too...
7) The HTC Kaiser WM 6.1 broke creating brush patterns. This is a straight GDI function! Its ridiculous. Works fine on Kaiser WM 6.0.
These are just the RECENT ones I can think of. Its getting ridiculous and you may notice - HTC is the manufacturer of all these devices. I truly blame them for poor drivers and poor design specs.
Mostly due to HTC, Windows Mobile is slowly going that same way. In the past we could write to the Windows Mobile spec and mostly everything worked on any device. Now HTC is doing so much custom stuff and breaking so many things its ridiculous. Palm is no better. They write their add-on software without regard to third party developers. They take customizable registry entries and turn them into static ones. They break APIs. They provide broken drivers. The list goes on.
Of late I've had things that worked for hundreds of devices stop working for just one because that OEM simply did a poor job. Here are some recent examples:
1) Motorola Q. SMS API hard freezes device. This is the main reason FlexMail had to move to using MAPI to send its SMS. Of course....
2) Palm Treo 750v. Palm introduces a great new threaded SMS. In the process they break MAPI SMS sending from third party apps.
3) (New) HTC Diamond. For years we've had the same code for reading Contact pictures. We get the image stream, draw it to a bitmap (for caching) then draw it on screen. Worked fine. HTC Diamond breaks this. We're testing some new code to see if we can fix this.
4) Dell Axim 50v. Drivers are broken for offscreen gradient functions. This is a straight GDI function!
5) All HTC devices with TouchFlo - no configuration to work with default applications
6) HP iPaq 21x and 11x devices. Drivers for storage (both main and SD/CF) corrupt data. Of course this also affects the built in apps too...
7) The HTC Kaiser WM 6.1 broke creating brush patterns. This is a straight GDI function! Its ridiculous. Works fine on Kaiser WM 6.0.
These are just the RECENT ones I can think of. Its getting ridiculous and you may notice - HTC is the manufacturer of all these devices. I truly blame them for poor drivers and poor design specs.
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Inferno
10 July 2008 - 04:32 AM
I have a Palm Treo 750v and I hate the fact that I cant use FlexMail for SMS as well as email. Its stupid. I think that device manufactures should alter their Windows Mobile installation to cope with their hardware and leave the developing of custom applications to developers.
Edit > I know it's not the same thing but what I also hate is when new computers come with all the useless pre-loaded software.
Edit > I know it's not the same thing but what I also hate is when new computers come with all the useless pre-loaded software.
Vince Koser
11 July 2008 - 06:15 PM
This is spot on. I get messages from people downloading my app ceTwit and its 100% .net with no funny stuff going on and it just crashes on launch on their devices.
It's frustrating, I can't possibly own / test every device before releasing and its near impossible to diagnose the problems on something I don't have in house.
http://www.kosertech.com
Vince
It's frustrating, I can't possibly own / test every device before releasing and its near impossible to diagnose the problems on something I don't have in house.
http://www.kosertech.com
Vince
spmwinkel
12 July 2008 - 10:11 AM
I'm not a developer but I do get worried when I read these messages. I've sent several screenshots of error messages to Vince Koser (above) but if the bugs can't be reproduced, I figure that it's hard to solve. Also, even if you don't have all devices yourself, not everyone has the luxury of having a large betatesting team with people with various devices.
What worries my as a consumer is that when too many PPC companies start developing for the iPhone, the PPC apps get less attention/development/updates/support. Even more when developers think WM could be going down. A few months ago when the iPhone was announced, people said "The amount of available software is a reason to stay with WM". But if developers are leaving the PPC development (or, to a lesser degree: cutting time from WM development to spend it on iPhone development), the WM market might be in trouble.
I thought HTC was doing an awesome job with their TouchFLO etc. but apparently there are drawbacks..l
What worries my as a consumer is that when too many PPC companies start developing for the iPhone, the PPC apps get less attention/development/updates/support. Even more when developers think WM could be going down. A few months ago when the iPhone was announced, people said "The amount of available software is a reason to stay with WM". But if developers are leaving the PPC development (or, to a lesser degree: cutting time from WM development to spend it on iPhone development), the WM market might be in trouble.
I thought HTC was doing an awesome job with their TouchFLO etc. but apparently there are drawbacks..l
Alex Kac - CEO/Founder
12 July 2008 - 06:47 PM
Problem with TouchFLO is that its not part of the OS. Its just a shell for the Today screen really. And because its a tacked-on piece (not integrated in any good way), it slows down the device dramatically. Look at the Diamond - all the reviews talk about how awfully slow it is. And it is. But remove all that TouchFlo stuff and its nice and fast.
Yet my wife's iPhone is fast all the time. And honestly, developing for the iPhone is a lot more fun. I constantly keep talking to other developers who tell me that. One app developer I know just developed a new game for the iPhone that took him 2 weeks and its really cool looking. First game. He said on WinMobile it would've taken him months and it still wouldn't look as good or work as well.
Palm has been dying and died as a force in the mobile area because they just laid back and did nothing. They had way more apps than WinMobile did at first. Now WinMobile sounds like Palm.
We're not giving up on WinMobile - I'm putting a ton of time into our WinMobile apps. But I'm starting to see less and less money in it. WinMobile is increasing its user-base, yet due to many factors fewer and fewer of those new users use the phone for apps. I want to see Microsoft fix this before its too late.
Yet my wife's iPhone is fast all the time. And honestly, developing for the iPhone is a lot more fun. I constantly keep talking to other developers who tell me that. One app developer I know just developed a new game for the iPhone that took him 2 weeks and its really cool looking. First game. He said on WinMobile it would've taken him months and it still wouldn't look as good or work as well.
Palm has been dying and died as a force in the mobile area because they just laid back and did nothing. They had way more apps than WinMobile did at first. Now WinMobile sounds like Palm.
We're not giving up on WinMobile - I'm putting a ton of time into our WinMobile apps. But I'm starting to see less and less money in it. WinMobile is increasing its user-base, yet due to many factors fewer and fewer of those new users use the phone for apps. I want to see Microsoft fix this before its too late.
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