Friday, August 27, 2004

Comment: The battle of handheld devices

PDAs were like all so good last year(that's when I bought my Sony Clie NX73V), with several old companies coming out with lots of new models(eg. HP, palmone, sony...), and some newbies comming in to the market with more new models(eg.garman, tapwave). But just about at the turn of the year, sales dropped, sony ditched the clie(sadly) and others bleeding. And many people started to say stuff like "smart phones are going to kill traditional PDAs" or "Microsoft is starting to kick Palm's ass". But I diagree with both.
There are 2 kinds of smart phones: the phones with all the whistles and bells(well the more common kind), and the PDA phone combos(like the treo & the P900) With the first kind, I think they are still just phones, and I would never want to "multi tap" everything into my datebook or todo list with a phones' tiny number board. As with the second kind, by the standards of a phone, they are bricks; but on the other hand, their tiny screens would never compare to my NX73's 320x480 transflective LCD--both are too small.
And with the battle of OS, I still prefere PalmOS's simplicity. I would hate to tap that many times (starting from that crazy start menu) to get what I want. And I certainly wouldn't want to "release memory" once in a while just because programs are still running in the background after you thought you told it to exit. As with SymbianOS, yes, much simpler than "You know what"OS, but I guess it supports too little software, they are still catching up. As for multimedia, yes that was once a weakness of palm, but not after the OS5 clies came out. I think clies' software does much better then PPC's media player.
After a year happy with my clie NX73 and a black and white screened simple PHS(not GSM) phone with email capability, I think phones should still be phones, and PDAs still do better in everything else you would expect from a great hand held device.

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