Rip Palm T5

My palm T5 is no more.

It has ceased to be, bereft of life, it rests in peace, it has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, it has expired and gone to meet its maker, it has shuffled off its mortal coil.

It is an ex-palm.

I have an history of almost 9 years using palm devices. From IIIx to Zire 71 and from there to Tungsten T5.
The IIIx endured a lot, I used it for 4 years, before an unfortunate accident between the screen and my fist ended its life.
The Zire was the replacement, and it worked great, util another unfortunate accident, this time completely accidental, between my elbow and the screen (again the screen). Lessons learned: don't have you PDA laying around in the middle of papers; buy a hard case)
I bought my refurbished T5 on ebay in 2005, and I've been using it until now, allways having a mediocre battery life.

Last week, my palm refused to leave the logo screen, with a dreaded line blinking on top of the screen. I've even tried the peculiar way of doing a cold reset; there are two ways, one is easy, the other is good for aliens with 12 fingers and 3 hands. But nothing worked. A quick search and I found that I was not alone, and there were no hope.

So now I have a dilema... what to do?

As for palm platform, I think I got to the end of the line. The OS is outdated, the divices all have keyboards, the applications are getting expensive. Time to move on.
As for pocket pc, there are more options in terms of hardware. The compact framework makes it simpler to develop applications, but the core OS is still windows...
As for symbian, I know very little about it... and the little I know, I don't like... I want to develop what I want in my mobile, and don't want anyone to sign it for me...
As for android, it doesn't exists yet...

So, do you have any recomendations?

Palm's last breath

I have been a fan of Palm for a long time. I currently have a T5, having previously owned a IIIx and a Zire 71. The greatest strength of Palm powered has always been it's simplicity. The applications were simple forms, to input your data and store information. But it's simplicity was the reason behind it's fall.
Things change, but Palm has found it hard to evolve... and the result is the loss of market. It had lot's of applications, but in recent years you had to pay for most of the useful stuff. And multimedia become an important usage for an handheld device. And the simple device, with the batteries lasting for 3 weeks, with 16 tone grayscale and 33MHz processor was a little on the low side...
They put a faster processor, more memory, a color screen, and all the advantages of Palm were gone... you had to struggle for you battery to last 1 whole week. This was the experience I had with my IIIx and Zire 71, respectively.
Nowadays I'm using my T5 to do everything an handheld can do. I can listen to MP3, I can watch movies, I can work with docs and excel. But the advantage over PocketPC is gone.

In the past weeks Palm has announced a new device, the Foleo. They call it a mobile companion, to boldly go where your laptop cannot go...
At around the same time, Asus showed a similar product, the Eee PC.
When you compare both, it's hard to imagine how can the Foleo survive. The screen is bigger, ok, but that also makes it larger. And the processor is ridiculous... and the memory is almost inexistent! The only real advantage is the great fault of the Eee, battery life.

To me, it looks like we are hearing Palm's swan song...

I hope i'm wrong...