"Is The Palm Pilot As Good As It Gets?"
(Mang's note: excerpt from wsj, I think they mistyped "Pocket PC" as "Power PC" in many places)
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
Staff Reporter
Palm Pilot seems to reign unchallenged. Or at least you'd be tempted to think so from looking at the
device's market share: a whopping 70% of hand-held computer owners world-wide use one of Palm
Inc.'s products, according to research company IDC. Even mighty Microsoft Corp. has struggled to
compete with the personal digital assistant, or PDA, whose name has come to represent that whole
category of devices.
But now there are some new reasons to take a fresh look at the pretenders to Palm's PDA throne.
Most notably, Microsoft has tuned up its much-maligned hand-held operating system, Windows CE,
rechristening it "Pocket PC" and spawning a new range of devices from a number of manufacturers.
These new hand-held computers are many things that the Pilot is not. Since they run what's essentially
a variant of Windows, they offer out-of-the-box synchronization with Microsoft Word, Excel,
Access, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, which means you can easily work with files from your
desktop computer, including e-mails. The Power PC machines are also multimedia powerhouses,
with audio recording capability, sound and video player software and stereo headphone jacks. And
their handwriting recognition software -- while numbingly frustrating at first and never more than
about 90% accurate in my experience -- is a bold attempt at fitting computers to our habits rather
than the other way around.
But, all that flash out of the starting gate doesn't mean the new devices win the race. The latest
features, for the most part, are accompanied by compromises that outweigh the additional
convenience. I ran into the most jarring of them when I began testing a few of the hand-held
computers: Pocket PC devices crash just like PCs running Windows do. I've been using an early
generation Palm Pilot practically daily for over four years now and that's never happened.
If you're like me, you'd rather forgo the system-error messages -- you see enough of those on your
desktop computer -- even it means sacrificing the latest electronic-book software on your hand-held.
If the new devices integrated wireless calling and Internet it might be a tougher calculation to make,
but for the moment at least that's not the case.
After using it on different devices for a week, I'm still not won over by the Power PC software. It
lacks the simplicity of the Palm operating system, the familiarity of Windows, and generally takes
more steps to execute applications. Simple tasks like deleting files often proved maddeningly
complicated to pull off. And it's still difficult enough to enter any text that you aren't likely to use the
devices for the sort of serious word processing, e-mailing, and spreadsheet entry that justifies their
price tags.
The field is uneven however and one machine, the Compaq Aero, almost offers enough to
compensate for the hassle. Below are the results of my testing of the latest offerings, including Palm's
newest entry and Psion PLC's keyboard-equipped model. |
