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Palm PDA Roundup
Melvin writes "Hardware Extreme has a roundup featuring some of the top PalmOS based PDAs in the market (and a few coming out in the 2nd and 3rd Quarter). Being a geek's gadget, :) I would recommend you guys to check out this roundup if you are planning to get a new Palm PDA."
-AD
Apparently, nowadays printing the back of the box where the specs are gleefully bullet pointed counts as a review.
Everything else is jut press releases...
The SL-5600, SL-B500, and SL-C700 will be avaiable Quarter 1 of 2003. Prices have not been set, but the SL-5600 is expected to retail in the $500-$600 range.
http://www.infosync.no/news/2002/n/2593.html
"Being a geek's gadget, :) I would recommend you guys to check out this roundup if you are planning to get a new Palm PDA."
This is a first ever: a Slashdot submission from the PDA itself! Now when did they become sentient....
...
Slashdot readers like myself may not like Palm PDA's because they don't cram a whole lot of whiz-bang features into the PDA's, they aren't laptop replacements in your hand, but that's NOT what Palm is gunning for. They're electronic organizers made for business professionals, and at this they excel. They are better at this job than PocketPCs. They are simple, elegant and trustworthy. You normally do not have to reset a Palm handheld 5 times a day like you do with a PocketPC unless something is horribly wrong with it or an application you have on it was coded by a 3 year old monkey.
Palm is not a sinking ship, they just don't target you as a user.
-- iCEBaLM
More of an advertising spot than a review; I was hoping for comparisons and criticisms on the different models.
Which one will play Quake 3?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I treat it much lower than the Palm Vx which is the epitome of a sexy PDA. The i705 is perhaps the worst PDA ever put out by Palm in that it does nothing except extend the life of Palm.net or whatever they called it. Even the Palm VIIx was more groundbreaking than the i705.
I do have to say that after moving from Palm to Pocket PC, the thing I miss the most is a decent battery life. My Toshiba e740 gets about 3 hours, while my Vx got about 2 weeks.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Does all that, with a kickass k/b. I can't imagine using PalmOS with graffitti and all that bs.
For those that are wondering, yes the Zaurus runs real Linux. Yes, Debian has been ported. Yes, a better pda environment than sharp's is under development. Yes, having a wifi CF card and a 256mb SD card is the high life. Yes you can connect that that serial terminal or k/b up.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Didnt you read the last Linux Uprising article?, Linux is getting hot in the handhelds world and i belive GPE Palmtop (GPL license) will become its best UI in a few years.
Dont get stuck with an useless and outdated OS, meet the future and get a Zaurus (or wait for the IBM Linux handhelds).
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Amen to that!
I have had several Palm units: PalmPilot Pro, IIIe, VIIx and i705. When Palm.Net plan changes would have put my monthly bill over $80, I canceled the account on the spot, since wireless access wasn't worth that much every month to me.
I bought a Toshiba e335, and tried it out for about three weeks. In that time:
(1) The alarm light never worked properly,
(2) The battery indicator would jump around from time to time,
(3) ActiveSync would drop out spontaneously, sometimes during a sync operation,
(4) The Transcriber, while a great idea, was awkward when entering appointments and tasks. I used the Block Recognizer (virtual Grafitti pad) more often, simply because it was one of the few thigns that worked reliably.
The OS got in the way of the things I needed to do. Thus, I reverted back to my i705, but haven't reactivated the service (yet). Simply put, the Palm just works. Plain and simple. The lower end units weren't designed to be used regularly to edit Word docs or Excel spreadshets--use your laptop to do that. Viewing them, I can understand, but not editing or creating new docs.
Is sound and color and hi-res graphics important? To some, yes--in that case go for a Sony or one of the Palms that will do such things. I for one don't plan on making a full-color presentation using my PDA--again, that is is what the laptop is for.
All in all, it really does matter what your target customer is. For me, the PocketPC was way too buggy and clumsy. The Palm interface does what I need it to do, cleanly and simply.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I just recently purchased the Samsung SPH-i330 smart phone, and I have been very happy with it. It runs PalmOS 3.5.3 with 16mb of RAM. It has a virtual silkscreen, so you can do fun stuff similar to what you can do with a HandERA such as having a full keyboard (SilkyBoard). The only draw back to it is that it doesn't have an expansion slot. I did purchase the data cable and hooked it up with my Delorme Earthmate GPS and XMap® Handheld Street Atlas USA® Edition. It works quite nicely like this.
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
I own both a Handera (Palm OS) and an IPAQ 1910. I do not have to reset the Ipaq 5x a day. (I did have to reset the Handera, however, every week or so, but that was OS4).
My company made a business decision on what to upgrade to. We really wanted to keep with the Palm OS, but there was no lightweight, OS 5, full screen versions out there. The Clie's are NOT made for business and are bricks, while the Palm T|T is not full screen (and is expensive).
We settled on the 1910 because of the form factor and very low weight (it's smaller than a Palm V). This is important, as if people can't stick it in their pocket they will not use them as often. They are also cheap; $300 retail, much less than the competing OS 5 models (with our business discount we got them for $264 each). Contrary to what I always thought when I used my Palm, Palms are NOT better at being an electronic organizer for business professionals. There are lots of little tricks you can do with the PPC that you can't do with a Palm -- if you move the left/right directional buttons in the Contact list for example, you can switch between different phone/fax numbers without going into the record itself. Pretty neat, and elegant.
It's a shame because I really loved my full-screen Handera. It's incredibly ironic that Palm users, after years of complaining that PPCs were heavy and were not "simplistic", are now buying up multimedia bricks like the Clies.
All these PDAs are cool but they all suck in one very important way. None of them work with any email/address/calendar clients besides Outlook, Notes or Eudora. And even there support is iffy. I'm still waiting for ANYTHING to fully sync with Mozilla. (Palm does a very half baked job and nothing else bothers)
I'd love to buy one of these but I need something that works with a genuinely cross platform email/address/calendar client. Evolution is great, Outlook is easy but none of these are on every platform I use. Without that, it's of no use to me.
The high-end Palms with high-end features (MP3, multitasking, cameras, high-resolution screens, etc.) are a horrible combination of hardware and software kludges to get PalmOS to do things that PalmOS was never designed to do. For example, many of those nifty features on the Clie have required Sony to hack their own extensions into PalmOS, and every Palm software vendor needs to accomodate those. And because each vendor hacks PalmOS to their liking, Palm can't even ship a single upgrade from PalmOS 5 to PalmOS 6--you will be able to upgrade your Sony only if Sony spends the time and money to create their own upgrade.
Unfortunately, the Linux PDAs aren't doing much better either. The Zaurus (I own one) is a brick. Several other Linux handheld startups went belly-up. And handhelds.org is fighting a constant battle to reverse engineer handhelds in order to run Linux on them--even handhelds that are developed within Compaq/HP, the company hosting handhelds.org. However, Motorola's use of Linux on their cell phones may give Linux on PDAs a new life.
I hate to say it, but if you are using Windows on your desktop and if you are looking for a high-end handheld, a PocketPC machine probably makes more sense. Even something like the iPaq h1910 ($299) runs rings around more expensive Palm models and is lighter to boot. The big problem with PocketPC is that it is completely proprietary: it pretty much only talks to Windows desktops and the primary development platform for it is Microsoft proprietary. But, then, it isn't clear to me why you would want a high-end handheld to begin with.
Overall, I'd just stick with the Palm Zire, and for the other features (MP3 player, GPS, camera, games, etc.) get separate, dedicated devices.
I am forced to disagree. Palm's machines, either by OS or by the system itself, are little more than the cheap $30 databanks you see in the stationary section of a store compared to a modern pocket PC. Every time someone refers to my Zaurus SL-5500 as a "Palm Pilot" i cringe and tell them to renounce their blasphemy. The Zaurus's organizer's functions are excellent, and i cannot imagine them being any better. The input ease from the slide-away KB or onscreen KB is excellent, and i have no complaints. It's powerful, and flexible. I could code and compile C programs, write HTML pages, or do any number of things on it if i wanted to. I could even edit images! It's got internal storage to spare, and like Palm or Handspring, doesn't need sync software or proprietary memory to work. (indeed, i've had it for months and have never synched it with another system...i just transfer things via CF or the wireless eth card.) It may have been $400, but it's well worth it. It's a real computer, just like my compaq laptop, my dual Athlon 2100+ workstation, my suns, apples, SGI, and my other x86's. It runs real linux! This also helps it cope with the instability problem the previous author was talking about. I've never had to reset my zaurus, EVER. It's a delight, and superior in every way to any palm. Even its organizer functions are awesome, especially considering i never have to worry about synching it, and i can connect to the web with full color and view real web pages, chat on IRC, and even download files with Qtella. Zaurus, and other PocketPC's, particularly the Linux ones, are the best handhelds out there. Better than WinCE Ipaq/Journada/Axiom/Toshiba systems, better than Palm and Clie, just plain better. AND they fit nicely in your pocket, backpack, briefcase, or laptop tote.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
The Zaurus sits unused while the Palm V still goes with me every day - because it's right there in my pocket with my keys!!! The Zaurus is just too big for that.
The Zaurus is kind of nifty but it's no real Palm replacement. Not to mention the battery life is terrible, especially if you even think about attaching a CF 802.11b card!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Get a keyboard. I've had different PDA's since the first Palm. My tests show I'm 3x faster with the little keyboard (I can't do a little "v" in grafitti so save my life). I've read that Jot has even more keystrokes than Grafitti.
2. Palm OS is everywhere. If you want to use off-the-shelf apps from avantgo, etc get a Palm.
3. The smaller the better. Who cares how cool your xyz toy is if you need a backpack, dorkyass beltloop holster or little purse (like my buds with they Sonys) to carry the thing around with you?
4. If your goal is hacking, just like the desktop, get linux. If you want it to solve problems with a minimum of fuss go with Palm OS
5. Color is nice for pictures of family, etc. Greyscale is fine otherwise IMHO.
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
Newsflash: Linux is not the perfect solution for every problem.
I want a PDA that will play oggs, take notes / jotted drawings, connect to an 802.11b network, or GPRS when that isn't availible and un a jabber client. Oh, and I want it to fit into a shirt pocket. If it runs Linux, fine. If it runs ObscureOS(tm) then that's fine as well. Hell, I'd even be happy with it running Wince if it did what I want it to...
The original Palm prototype was a block of wood, and the only constraint that the design team was given was that their design should be no bigger than the block of wood. If I'm going to cary this thing around with me all day, I want it to be easy to carry. Linux is great in a server, but you simply do not need a full-featured, server-class OS in a PDA. Someone I know recently bought a Wince machine. It has a 400MHz CPU. It feels about as fast as a 33MHz dragonball based Palm (although the latter can't handle ogg playback).
A PDA is not a desktop computer, and should not be treated as such.
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