Fired up by David's letter and curious about this software I hadn't heard of, I went looking for TealOS. I expected to take a quick look, think, "Not bad," and move on. Instead, I bought it five minutes after downloading the trial.

Bear in mind that I wrote an article for Computing Unplugged about the Palm Pre. I spent hours reading other articles and Palm's documentation, researching every aspect of the new device. You'd think I'd have known what it was like.

But trying out TealOS made me want a Pre a million times more than I did before. It's like the difference between looking at a picture of a tropical beach and actually digging your toes into the sand.

What were they thinking?
As a writer, I am fully in support of protecting intellectual property. I wouldn't want something I'd worked hard on being taken from me and used for someone else's gain without my permission.

But why didn't Palm give their permission? David's letter suggested Palm should license TealPoint to use the design of the Pre, and that would certainly have worked. They could also have bought the software from TealPoint, at a fair price, and then given it out for free on their own Web site.

In March of 2006, Palm reported that over 34 million devices had been sold. Even if only a fraction of those devices are still in use, Palm could have had millions of people trying out the Pre's interface before it's even available, building demand for the product.

Not only that, but TealPoint has been a huge supporter of Palm. They have thirty products available, all for the Palm OS, and they've been making Palm software since 1997. They'd even begun work on porting many of their applications to the Palm Foleo, and all of that work was lost when the Foleo was abruptly cancelled. Certainly, that's a risk of developing software for a new platform, but I'd imagine Palm's latest slap in the face makes it even harder to take.