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Technology Stocks : Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric L who wrote (123)	9/16/2000 8:43:26 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 817

Eric, I went over the sites you referred to quickly and I think right at this moment, the analysts and reporters are really confused as to what a PDA is. For machines like the HP Journada 720 and ALL the Psion Revos, Netbook psion.com what have you, they are all not Palm-like devices. Their form factor is a big fat horizontal screen with a 3/4 keyboard attached. This sort of form-factor is usually referred to as "communicator" - because that's how the manufacturer usually call them. The characteristics of these "communicators" are: 1. They are smaller than a mini-notebook but they don't run window, instead they run Win CE or the Symbian EPOC OS. 2. They are bigger (much bigger) than a Palm-like pda and you can't put them in your pocket and you don't get a "wow" from your friends. They may even comment "what the heck you carry that big thing around for !? Isn't working at a PC at work boring enough ?! ". These kind of form-factor had proven to be a failure but I don't know why all of a sudden companies are resurrecting them. The only real competitors to Palm are the iPaq H3600, HP Journada 540, and the Blackberry. hp.com www6.compaq.com OK, after I went to the HP site, I seem to have figured it out now. The Horizontal screen ones they called "handheld PC" and the Palm-like ones they called "pocket PC" ! But the journalists somehow called them all "PDA"s. Mang