[x999x]

This IS good news, but coming from someone who's used PDAs for almost 10 years now, Palm OS is really really limited.

I can liken Palm OS to Mac OS, in that they both have padded walls for the user to bump in to, it's very friendly, and has that cutesy look to it similar to mac.

Nintendo have made a good choice for an OS if they did infact license it from Palm, however it pales in comparison to what the PocketPC (Windows CE) OS can do. In fact, the PocketPC's computing power has pushed it to the forefront of PDAs, overtaking palms market almost entirely.

Palm on the other hand merged with Handspring to stay alive, then later broke off into two companies, Palm One and Palm Source. One makes pda hardware like the Treo pda/phones, and the other continues to streamline it's old and tired OS, Palm OS.

Palm OS will now doubt get the job done when it comes to personal information management, PIM, but many of the other cool whizzbang features like Web Browsing, Instant Messaging, Multimedia Playback all take a back seat, because Palm was never designed to do that, and as a result, you're left with mediocre playback. The point is, it manages information, it's not a multimedia tool like pocketPC's are, palm can do media playback, but compared to a pocketPC, you're better off using the MovieAdvance for this purpose.

Possible problems: Syncing

There's bound to be some issues here, primarily how Ninty plan on syncing all your information. Syncing is essentially matching the current data on your workstation/personal computer to your PDA. This keeps all your email addresses, contacts, even emails up to date, so that you can access that inormation anywhere. You can also write emails on the PDA, and the next time you sync, your PC will send it out. Here inlies the problem, to sync data like this, you need to use Palm's "Palm Desktop" software which is what you use to store all this information. This is great for people just starting, but for people like me who have thousands of contacts in Microsoft Outlook, as well as emails and such, there's no way for the Palm based PDA to access that information, I'm stuck having to switch all my data over to Palm's software. There are, however, conduit applications that act as a gateway between your pda and the programs you prefer to use, like Outlook. This solves my problem, but costs an extra 30 bux because it's a program not made by palm. This same problem carries over to the mac, but at least Ninty had the foresight to use Palm OS rather than PocketPC OS, because Palm is native to both Mac and PC for syncing purposes.

I'll prolly get this addon if it is ever released, and not a rumor. It won't replace my PocketPC which smokes anything the DS can do outside of gaming, but I think it will be somethign cool to play around with, and maybe even a substitute for my PocketPC when I don't feel like carrying both on me.