Which to Buy?
Which Palm OS unit should I buy for development?
This is a very simple question to answer, because a typical program runs on all current Palm OS devices. Unless you need some uncommon hardware feature or exorbitant amounts of memory or processor speed, any current unit will do. You might even be able to get away with using an older, used unit. You will probably be doing most of your development and testing on your PC, so platform speed is not a critical concern with Palm development as it is for most other kinds of development.It is possible to develop a program solely with POSE, never actually running your program on a real Palm OS device. But, POSE has real limits, so it can't give you a fully accurate picture of how your program will behave on real devices.
If you plan to publically distribute your program and want it to work on Palm OS 5, it is a good idea to do some testing on a real Palm OS 5 device before final release, either by buying one or by finding someone who has one to test for you (TonyGies will usually be willing to test things for you on a few real Palm OS 3.5 and 5 devices). The OS 5 Simulator does not emulate the ARM architecture that OS 5 devices are based on and thus very low-level functions and programs that make use of obscure oddities of the ARM architecture may behave differently on a real device. Furthermore, the PalmOne Tungsten T3 and a few of Sony's PDAs have some specific differences from other OS 5 devices (like the 320x480/320 dynamically changable screen size on the Tungsten T3) that can cause things like direct screen access to not behave as you expect them to.