Never liked Palm. Gave Sony the benefit of the doubt and bought the U50 or something like that, cool hardware but the OS was such crap I found it useless. $500 down the drain!
The new WebOS (sounds like they got smart and dropped the whole "Palm" thing if I've heard right) looks decent, but I don't think it's any competition for Android, iPhone, or even Windows Phone.
A great deal depends upon what you expect Palm OS to do for you. The current fashion is to participate in an ultra connected world. Palm hit its high mark before all that existed. It was originally conceived as a portable personal computing device and optionally, thru Hot Syncing, be an extension of your computer desktop. The earliest and most humble Palms do that brilliantly. Also, a huge open source library grew up around this very compact and efficient OS.
And here's the sacrilege. What if someone does not want to be connected? What if someone wants their data to be completely private? Just try to find a modern device with PDA-like function (or e-book reader) that is NOT connected whether you want it to be or not. Privacy is increasingly a concept of the past.
My nephew was showing off an astronomy program on his droid the other day. With GPS, the program knew his location down to the meter. It also knew its orientation. If he merely pointed it at Ursa Major, that constellation showed on the screen. He could not have been more thrilled (or trusting). I could not have been more horrified. Corporations know most users will give away their soul for a new connected feature.
The noose is tightening and no one seems in the least concerned.
