I've been a Palm user since 2001. My wife and I use them, and when it made sense, we converged our phone and PDAs into the Treo/Centro. For a while, a 'smartphone' was synonymous with a Treo...business and personal. For me as an airline and military pilot, it could do everything and allowed me to carry one less item on my person. Using Yahoo calendar, it allowed us to see each other's schedules, sync with Quicken at home so I wasn't bogged down with receipt entries when I came home from a trip, texting on a real keyboard, etc. Palm darn near dominated the market for both enterprise and personal use.
Then Apple came along and changed the game. Nothing wrong with that of course, that's what makes life interesting.
Palm could have recovered, but some of their decisions when they decided to intro a next gen phone were bad...selecting Sprint as the launch carrier, dodgy hardware issues, crappy marketing. The Palm Pre could do things over a year ago that the IPhone still can only just now do, including true multitasking (not just quick app, task completion, etc), and the big one, Synergy, which can take multiple contacts from several sources (including Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook, etc) and fuse them into one list, no duplicates or redundant entries. Does the same with emails, calendars, etc. It will do all the work for you in terms of fusing everything together. Plus the phone can recharge using a magnetic induction puck (Touchstone)...all built in to the phone, not adding some kludge device to do it...no plugin, nothing like that. Just set it down and it starts charging. Even little things like being able to shut the phone completely down, have a removable battery, and a hardware switch to silence the phone.
All of this on an open, non-slaved platform. If you come out with an app that can do the job better than the app that comes from Palm, Palm isn't going to shut it down, unlike Apple.
The WebOS is still considered a superior OS, the problem is that it's saddled with only okay hardware. You pair up WebOS with something like the HTC Incredible, and things would get interesting.
FC