Microsoft has an "overly constrained reference model", said David Nagel, chief executive of PalmSource.
"I think that the Pocket PC market is pretty dreary in the sense that there's often not much innovation. They (Microsoft) require the hardware manufacturers to build exactly the same kind of device except maybe for the skin," he told CNETAsia.
On the other hand, he cited game device firm TapWave and watchmaker Fossil as examples of companies taking the Palm operating system into new directions.
"Tapwave research shows that there a large number of young people who, for the last 10 years or so, adopted devices like the Nintendo Game Boy and are now older and have more income and are looking for a high-performance game device," he said.
Nagel spoke to CNETAsia from Beijing, where he was launching the Chinese-language version of Palm OS 5, the company's first attempt at producing native support for the language.
The platform comes a year after rival operating system Pocket PC had included support for simplified Chinese, the version used in China.
However, Nagel feels being late won't put Palm OS at a major disadvantage.
"We have managed to compete effectively with Microsoft everywhere else in the world, and expect to do so here. Our market share in the US is between 75 to 80 percent, even with Microsoft outspending us enormously in advertising," he said.
The delay in launching Chinese support was caused by the need for the software to drive the various display modes the market demanded, said Nagel. Chinese text needs a higher resolution than Western script to be legible, but the resolution can't be too high or else the cost would be prohibitive, he said.
He admitted that PalmSource's Chinese language support was not as sophisticated as others. Palm's input uses the pinyin method, based on the Western alphabet. Other handheld platforms have for years allowed direct Chinese stroke input. "We think pinyin is useful as a starting point, but it's a starting point," he said. Moving to the ARM chip and away from the 68K processor will provide powerful character- and speech-recognition algorithms to the Palm OS in the future, he said.
For some years, third-party software overlays that provide Chinese-language support for the Palm OS have existed. Palm OS licensees bundle these overlays in products sold in China. However, as overlays, they are less stable than native OS support. Accurate Chinese character recognition has also been a problem.
In addition, the most popular language overlay, CJKOS (Chinese, Japanese, Korean Operating System) costs $28 (£17.55) by itself.
Nagel said that as China was to be the largest wireless market in the world, it was important for his company to carve a significant share of it.
He shares the belief with some analysts that in the coming years, wireless-enabled handhelds as well as smart phones would vastly outnumber simple handhelds.
"You would have to agree just from the sheer numbers. The worldwide market for traditional PDA is less than 20 million units. All of 2004 is 30 to 34 million and the number for phones is 400 to 450 million units," he said.
Chinese PalmSource licensee GSL has produced the G18, which Nagel believes to be the most compact smart phone to date. Such products prove that the Palm OS can exist in both the traditional PDA and the smart phone space, he argued. China's largest PC maker, Legend Group, is also a licensee and sells the 168, a PDA with a camera.
The OS -- dubbed Palm OS 5 Simplified Chinese Edition -- is based on the ARM-compliant Palm OS 5 platform, and incorporates new multimedia and wireless features.
It supports up to 128MB of RAM (random access memory) including card storage expandability for advanced enterprise and multimedia-rich applications, and provides support for 16-bit colour and uses the QVGA (Quarter Video Graphics Array) standard -- a display format measuring 320 x 240 pixels -- that allows low density of 160x160 and 160x220, and high density of 320x320 and 320x480 for multimedia applications
The lunar calendar has also been integrated into the date book, said the statement.
Talkback
PocketPC overconstrained??? This from the company that stays so far behind the curve that it took Sony and Handspring to finally get them to realise that 160x160 wasn't enough for most people and that expansion modules are a good thing?
Sheesh. Talk about clueless.
The PocketPC reference platform is only overconstrained to the degree that not every possible CF or SD card peripheral has a driver built into the OS - and that's never going to happen because there are just too many possible things you can plug into a PocketPC.
Fortunately, PalmOS users don't have that problem or Palm would have to deal with it.
Had to laugh a bit at this. This is from the head of half the company who gave us the same-old, same-old until they were dragged, kicking and screaming, by innovations in the Pocket PC world and in the Palm world, done by Sony. So the "flexible" Palm is still mostly playing catch-up with the "dreary" Pocket PC. I'll stick with my dreary handheld for now.