The Apple PDA
By Don Crabb, ZDNet
When Steve Jobs pulled the plug on Apple's innovative, but overpriced and oversized PDA, the Newton MessagePad 2100, last year, Apple promised to release one or more Mac OS-based PDAs to replace it. At this point, with no Apple PDA yet announced, and only rumors of the consumer iMac-style notebook Mac to make us feel flush, a lot of Mac OSers are asking "what's happened to the Mac OS PDA?"
The short answer, I'm afraid, is "it never was." Although we will see the consumer notebook later this spring, that device is much too large to be considered a PDA -- even by the hefty standards set by Windows CE. After repeated official and nonofficial inquiries inside Apple, I have been unable to find a soul who knows anything about a real Mac OS-based Apple PDA being developed, at any price.
It would seem, then, that Apple pins its meagre PDA hopes on the minor improvements made to the 3Com Palm VII and its beta software for tying it to the Mac.
Despite kudos from industry guns, the Palm MacPac v2 is just not that big a deal. Its "seamless integration" (when was integration anything but seamless in the world of computing?) is anything but in my experience. Does it work to synchronize data between your Palm device and your Mac? Sure. Does it work so well I am ready to dump by workhorse MessagePad 2100? Not a chance in hell.
Sure, the MacPac v2 does have some nice features that the Windows software lacks. As MacWorld columnist David Pogue notes, "the new Palm MacPac v2 software works so well that it will make the Macintosh what it should have been all along: the premier platform for the Palm."
True, the Palm Desktop for Macintosh lets you organize your contact list any way you want, with the toolbar making it a snap to perform tasks such as printing.
In addition, the Palm Desktop gives you quick access to all your contact information with HotSync and other tools.
But...
My problem with that analysis is that the Mac to Palm combo is still a shadow of what the MessagePad offered (or still offers, in my case). Even with MacPac v2, the Palm OS ain't no Newton. And though MacPac v2 includes a new "universal sprocket" that lets other Mac software talk to the Palm, the use of this sprocket is problematic at best, and impossible at worst. Or at least that's what the Palm/Mac developers I have talked to report.
Apple needs a real PDA for its customers. That real PDA is not a Palm, not matter how you dress it up. That real PDA should be based on Mac OS, just as Windows CE is based on Windows. It should allow you to run some versions of your existing Mac OS software, unchanged. And its integration with the full Mac OS should be so tight, you couldn't find a gap with a scanning electron microscope.
The Apple iPDA, let's call it. From $299 to $699, depending upon extras. PC card compatible. 20MB of ROM Mac OSware built-in, and 40MB of user RAM standard. Plus a 56K modem, network connection, wireless option, handwriting recognition (none of that Graffiti crap), even an optional hard keyboard.
I'll take two.
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