It's encouraging from a software portability perspective Koen, however, I think there are some problems with how it maps to the OEM market that PalmSource aim at..
Personally I think they would have been better sticking to something proprietary and controlling the API version themselves. - PalmOne is the only vendor that has a track record of regular OS updates so unless the culture changes the devices will become stale quickly.
And I'm afraid 'geeks' don't buy enough PDAs to satisfy the OEM market.
My advice to Access/PalmSource is....
i. Synchronise the versioning between Garnet and Cobalt.
ii. Announce that Garnet will be continued and refined and has just as much future as Cobalt.
iii. Ensure that OEMs get on the bandwagon with updates to both OSs.
The reason that I state this is that unless you over stretch Garnet you probably have the snappiest PDA OS around, it far outstrips Symbian and WinCE in terms of pure useability and response. The one thing that they don't need is a single offering that performs as slowly as WinCE and isn't as popular.
+ the uncertainty over the future of Garnet is sure to be hurting sales and OEM sales.
-Andy
