PDAs
All the PDAs | OS Comparison |
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Psion was the first to invent the PDA with the popular Series 3 in 1991; it was built in a clamshell design. Psion sold around 100.000 units. Then came Palm with the Palm Pilot in March 1996 which was the first PDA to be without a keyboard, and then came Microsoft with Windows CE in November 1996 .
Now there are are just two companies left: Microsoft and PalmSource, as Psion the great British company has stopped any development and quitted the handheld market in 2001. I hope that they will come back in few years with the same quality of products they were shipping until now (Remember the Psion 5Mx, Revo, Revo Plus.....).
What do I have to buy, a Pocket PC or a Palm OS device?
There is no real answer to this, it depends..
I will try to be the most objective possible, and to
give a brief explanation of each OS, then I will give the
advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
Palm OS was built from the beginning around simplicity,
that means that a Palm is not meant to be a desktop
replacement, all the applications are made to be small,
fast, and the user interface is very simple. On the other hand Pocket PCs were meant to be desktop
replacements; each PPC has built in multimedia capabilities
like the ability to listen to MP3's and watch videos.
Every PPC also comes with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel,
Pocket Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, which
are the slim application versions of their desktop counterparts.
The first question before buying a PDA is to know
your needs from a PDA. If
you need multimedia capabilities you definitely have
to go with a Pocket PC; although the new Palm OS 5
supports multimedia natively, Pocket PCs are still
more mature and being able to watch wmv files natively is really better. On the other hand if all you need is to be able to organize your schedule, listen to some MP3 without watching videos I recommend Palm OS. You should also consider
the environment you live or work in: if all the people
in your enterprise are using one brand you should
better stick with it because you will have more support
and you will be more compatible with other people.
What comes with Palm OS in the ROM is the bare minimum
but it is what most people use.
Concerning expansion capabilities Pocket PCs are
the best, some devices like the Toshiba E-740 offer
dual expansion slots: CF (Compact Flash) and SD (Secure
Digital) .
A thing to consider too is that Palms in general have better battery life than Pocket PCs. Palms are in general lighter than PPCs. PPCs have more functionality built in the ROM.
Deciding whether to buy a Palm or a Pocket PC only the amount of RAM is wrong because Palm OS is more memory efficient than Windows Mobile. While you get a maximum of 16 MB of RAM for a Palm right now (November 2002), you can get 64 MB of RAM for a Pocket PC, but that doesn't mean that Pocket PCs are better. Pocket PCs requires more memory than Palms, which means that a Palm with 16MB of RAM can be compared to a PPC with 64 MB. You should also note that Pocket PCs are multitasking, which means that you can execute many applications at the same time; so you should leave an amount of the RAM for program execution (16MB at least), however on Palms you do not need that because Palm OS 5 is more memory efficient although it is multitasking too .
There is no real better handheld, buy what suits you the best. If you want the best multimedia capabilities available choose a Pocket PC because of its better support to video. If you need simplicity, ease of use and peace of mind choose Palm OS.