> Symbian was right all along in its approach to mobile OS development.
From what you wrote i'd say that PalmOS was most likely more "right" - after all their motto was that they didn't compete with other PDAs, but with pen and paper and because of that everything had to be instant.
Also IME having worked with SymbianOS (at least the versions found in mobiles like Nokia 6600, never tried the later ones using Qt) the development experience was beyond abysmal. I remember at a job years ago i made a graphical application - it took me less than an hour to implement the core functionality of the application but about a month to make the full application. This includes writing everything about the UI from scratch using the framebuffer functionality it had because the official APIs were so convolutely braindead that it was impractical to work with them - it was much faster to do everything from scratch and avoid the SymbianOS as much as possible. The amusing bit (in hindsight) was when someone form Symbian visited us they were impressed we managed to make the application in a single month and "normally" we'd need six months for it - meanwhile i had... evil thoughts about their OS (i maintained a polite facade though, i think :-P).
(later i was told by someone else that this was because SymbianOS was originally meant to work on much weaker hardware, but IMO that was a bad excuse since they never maintained backwards compatibility so they could have cleaned up their APIs, not to mention that SymbianOS added so much unnecessary complexity that a much simpler API would actually be both faster and easier to work with)
PS. i never worked with PalmOS myself so it might be as bad or worse than SymbianOS but from a quick glance at a couple of tutorials it seems straightforward to program