I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.

Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.