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Pocket PC 2002
Microsoft is holding some sort of launch event today for a pile of new Pocket PC devices. Pocket PC Thoughts has a bunch of news items; PDA Buzz has a report and pretty comparison chart looking at the different models, and I'm sure people will post more links in the comments. So, is this the mighty Palm-killer?
There are warehouses full of Palm devices they can't give away while HP, Casio, and Compaq are having trouble manufacturing Pocket PC's fast enough to meet market demand.
Huh? I don't get it. MHz matters not on an organizer. What matters are ease of use, battery life, and cost. What's clobbering Palm is the fact that people are still happy with the Palms they bought 2-3 years ago and see no need to upgrade - not a wholesale shift to Pocket PC.
sulli
RTFJ.
One day he got an iPaQ to replace his Palm Pilot. "Oh, are you going to run Linux on it?" I asked him. "No," he said, "I am running Windows CE."
When I asked him why, he said it was simply easier to develop software for Windows CE handhelds. Palm forces you to buy a developer kit, but you can use standard Microsoft tools to develop for Windows CE. Windows CE 3.0 even has the source code available.
Palm has a large legacy base, but they've missed the boat both with development tools and with color screens and MP3 playback. Why should I buy a Palm when I can buy a handheld PC that I can use as an MP3 player, voice recorder, and have wireless Internet access in full color to boot?
Dataquest thinks so too.
They're nice, much as the wave of Pocket PCs they're replacing were. But they still cost $600. $600 is what a lot of companies pay for their desktop systems these days. They have their place, and they'll sell all right.. but nobody has yet come out with a usable $150-$300 Pocket PC, and that's what most Palms sell for, even color ones now.
Palms do a lot less. They store less. They can't play MP3s without extra hardware, can't run a WinFrame client decently, and so on. They're also cheap enough to be an impulse purchase or a cheap corporate gift to employees. Some companies give senior managers Pocket PCs. But other companies give low-end Palms to pretty much anyone on a yearly salary.
The $450 high-end Palms don't compete well on features with the fancy Pocket PCs, though they are markedly simpler and quicker to use for the core organizer functions. But Palm's bread and butter nowadays is the low-to-midrange, as it is for Handspring too. And the Pocket PC devices just don't compete there at all.
Palm does need to boost its specs and give the OS a facelift soon, and they seem to be working on that with their announced move to RISC processors and the Be acquisition. But you can bet they'll stick to $200 mass-market PDAs and leave the $600 devices to whoever wants them. And all the talk about Compaq's iPaq beating Palm in sales numbers is based on dollars--on a low-margin, high-cost product. And with the Palm III/m100 series making up the bulk of Palm sales during that period, that still meant Palm was beating them by at least 3:1 in unit sales.
The first PDA powered by solar power wins. It might have a battery for backlighting during the night but as soon as you don't have to worry about batteries i want one. In this regard Palm/Handspring have a shot since they don't require much power as it is.
IMHO...
If you have a Pocket PC, check it out. It's kinda useless, but it's still fun...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Audio functionality together, visual functionality together (Like my TRGpro and Kodak Palmpix), Audio/Visual functionality apart. Then communicate with something like Bluetooth.