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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (2692)	3/22/1998 11:51:00 PM
From: Gary Spiers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

<< Mostly Off Topic>> Catching up after a weekend of play and I am glad that somebody finally pointed out that OROM is read only - helps separate the advertising hype from the reality. In no way could it be considered a competitor for flashram. I would be very surprised if a read/write optical holographic technology makes the market in the next five years and is simultaneously competitive with flashram's price and ruggedness. On the subject of WinCE 2.0 - devices using this have been available in the US since before Christmas. It is a flawed operating system - just peruse the newsgroups for a sampling of user frustrations. A simple example - Pocket Excel and Pocket Word on the CE devices use a file format that is incompatible with desktop Excel and Word. In order to transfer files the CE unit must be docked to the desktop and special translation software used. This means that the travelling executive can not send and receive excel or word files as attachments - if he sends them to a colleague they will be in the pocket format and unreadable by his colleague and if his colleague sends desktop versions to him they will be unreadable on the palmtop! Anyone who spends ~$800 for one of the crippled colour WinCE palmtops when they can get a Toshiba Libretto running Win 95 with a real hard disk for ~$1000 must be insane IMHO. As one of the articles you referenced intimated, palmtops are getting bigger, not smaller. As a regular palmtop user (for over 4 years) my priorities are: small size, long battery life and independence from my desktop - the current drive to larger colour WinCE devices is exactly counter to this. Probably why I am still using an old Dos HP200LX (upgraded to 32MB memory internally and clock doubled) which can run rings around the current WinCE devices in terms of functionality (show me a WinCE device that can run optical ray tracing, compiler, electrical circuit analysis and symbolic mathematics programs) but it does not look as sexy as the colour screen WinCE boat anchors ;-) Hmm, just read my rantings - better mark them as off topic or delete them! Gary