I want to comment on the Tungsten C Simulator for example.
The real device doesn't have a Graffiti area, which leads to some differences in the user interface (no taps in that area, etc).
Why does the Tungsten C Simulator have a Graffiti area then? This makes some bugs (which happen on the real device) non-reproducible on the Simulator, which I'm sure no one wants...
Because the simulators were not primarily designed as an external developer platform. Instead, their primary audience was PalmSource's own developers and those working for out licensees; they were a way to quickly get a lot of the code in Palm OS built and tested using desktop tools. The theory is that all the code that lives above the device and hardware abstraction layers can be built first as part of the desktop simulator, tested using the excellent tools that exist for the Win32 platform, and then integrated into the device using expensive and harder-to-use embedded tools. This strategy has worked very well.
However, the feature set needed for this kind of work is very different from what's needed by external software developers that are targeting the devices. With limited resources, the priority of adding features that aren't useful to OS or device developers has been fairly low, although it's been getting more priority lately.
I don't know exactly what happened with the Tungsten C simulator, but I expect that PalmOne decided that they didn't need to exactly simulate the keyboard hardware on the device, since PalmSim already had it's own keyboard support. The code was never written, and it was easier to leave sim with a Graffiti area than to figure out how to take it out.
A side question, are skins for any of the Simulators being planned (so that the Simulators look at least somewhat similar to the real devices), or is that something for the distant future (or maybe won't ever be implemented)?
The Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 simulator supports skinning using the same format skins as supported by the Palm OS Emulator. The 5.4 and 6.1 simulators are the first releases where input from the external development community was used to develop simulator requirements; the 6.1 simulator is pretty nice to use, IMO.
-- Ben Combee, Technical Lead, Developer Services, PalmSource, Inc. "Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/ Developer Fourm Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/
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