Well, Palm can be a great device for embedded applications. It's quite difficult to reach the price:feature ratio (in small quantities) and "time to market" of using a Palm as compared with a standard 8051 series ONLY if the application justified. A Palm with TCP stack (netlib), IrDA, a stable OS, digitizer, graphics LCD, low power consumption design, nice casing design and lots more is quite expensive to achieve using a standard 8051.

However, if you were to interface to external peripherals (lots of it) via serial port, it can become a bottleneck when speed is a concern. How I wish, Palm do have a 16-bit I/O port (hee hee wishful thinking).

Overall, Palm is a great device for user interface. Perhaps some day, Palm will have another market segment to target at industrial usage instead of normal consumers. A Palm with I/O port, serial port, ethernet port and etc.

Actually, all this are possible as Palm has written a Palm OS cater for a ARM core instead of the traditional Motorola DragonBall processors. As some version of ARM core do have ethernet features, syn and asyn serial port and ofcourse, some I/Os. Recently TI even release a processor with a DSP+ARM core on the same die. Who knows, maybe someday this will happen.

Best Regards
Andy