Remember Palm?

Readers of the Register do, and not very fondly.
With reason. The Palm family of devices (especially the Handsrping Visor) were at one point the handheld device of choice.
I had one in those halcyon days... A Handspring Visor: sleek, nice screen size and expandable.
At the time I was wearing a lot of hats working in an industrial shop. One of my roles was that of the "management" rep on the Joint Health and Safety Committee. The Visor made publishing the weekly reports on the state of the floor a breeze; write (not type) the damn thing on the handheld, pull it into word when I got back to my desk and email the bugger off.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much I sneered down my nose at PokcetPC/WindowsCE/Windows Mobile/whatever the hell it's called this week users. Their battery life was shite.
Their colour displays were cluttered with a UI ripped from a desktop OS designed for a 17" monitor.
Their hardware crashed often where I had to work to crash mine.

But it all came crashing down. The reasons don't matter at this point, only the result.

They had the handheld market by the proverbial short and curlies and did jack about it.

To paraphrase the movie adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: What I am trying to say is that the Treo is a blip on the radar, a high point on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory.

And as far as gadget quality goes, I think its a damned shame.