Pocket PC vs. Palm Showdown

Espectr0 writes "TuxTops has a small review comparing the Pocket PC handhelds against the Palm ones (no pun intended), with advantages and disadvantages of each. The conclusion? If you are after gaming, multimedia, good WiFi+Bluetooth support, a lot of accessories and versatility, go with Pocket PC. If you are after small and stylish devices with good battery life, simple interface and simple PIM apps, go with PalmOS."

Comments

Overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a very nice $600 pocket pc - the Cassiopeia. It was (and still is) a great device. Why do I now own a palm device? I got tired of Microsoft and its obsession with digital rights management schemes - for ebooks, for music, for video - you name it.

Re:Overrated

[Locutus]

Never owned a WinCE device but have and use a Zaurus. I classify that as a pocketPC( not PocketPC(tm) ) and still find the ease-of-use provided by my Palm the best for PIM functionality. There's enough there to enable a good amount of usefull utilities/addons too.

IMO, the GUI's used in the pocketPC world just add too many clicks/taps to the system. Not to mention taking up valuable screen space. For instance, WTF is with having a titlebar? I still use the Zaurus for engineering work( mobile device programmer, bluetooth control application, on-the-road WWW and email via bluetooth/T69i, business apps, etc ) but the Palm is what I use( wife too ) for addressbook, scheduling, shopping lists, etc( PIM stuff ).

I wouldn't call the Palm "simple", I'd call it easy and convenient to use. I wouldn't touch a WinCE based device even if after 8 years and over $8 billion dollars, Microsoft has made it alittle better than before. Their desire to protect their monopoly with DRM and IP licensing of anything they can just restricts the device too much. Putting the PalmOS and/or GNU/Linux over WinCE can be the only option to make the device "usable". IMHO.

LoB

Security?

[bill_mcgonigle]

And what if you care about security? What's the state of virus/anti-virus (and worms, trojans, etc) on both platforms?

Re:Meh?

[colmore]

http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildse riesbean.do?series=P7D

Your suggestion isn't really that far-fetched. Personally I can't see going with a PocketPC, they can do a whole lot, but they're kind of clunky to use. I'd go for an ultraportable laptop over one of those (better Linux support as well...)

However, you can have my Palm V when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. They need to just do an update on that model. Same screen (at least keep it legible-anywhere green & black) a bit more storage and power, and wireless.

My point! Oh god, I can't feel my point!

[mister_llah]

Actually, as much as I was also trying to be funny, my point was quite similar to what you've just said (not the Palm V part ;) ) ...

For all you'd pay for the latest and greatest Palms and Pockets... save a little more and get a laptop...

I have a palm and a laptop... the laptop goes everywhere with me... (and I walk everywhere, I have a lovely backpack for it) ... so I wait a little longer on boot up (ack! 30 seconds of my life gone! ahhhh!), its not like I need to see my schedule *RIGHT NOW*... its just so much more versatile... :)

===

Now, cell phones with Palms built in, that's a different story, those kick some serious hindquarters ;)

PalmOS is what a palm os is supposed to be

[vansloot]

In a world: simplicity. I can get to pretty much anything on my Palm in a tap or two. It is extremely elegant, as it was designed for palmtop devices. WinCE feels like Win95 smashed into a small device. I never thought the Windows UI was that elegantly designed in the first place, and that problem is only magnified on a palmtop. I also can't say I've ever wanted to play a video on my palmtop, and I have an iPod for my music (20GB beats a couple hundred MB any day).

What about Linux?

[anthony_dipierro]

I'm not sure if this is possible with the Palm devices, but I've got Linux running on my iPaq.

Ah, Well

[CaptainZapp]

Instead of inserting myself into the fray I bought some popcorn, a front row seat and a Nokia 9300.

Pretty good organizer/phone with the added benefit of not getting into religious bullshit.

Re:Ah, Well

[SA Stevens]

I'll admit I was suprised to see what appears to be a PDA article here in the land of 'PDAs are obsolete, get a cellphone.'

The thing is, my Palm Tungsten E works wether or not I pay a monthly fee to some cell subscription service or not.

Your cellphone might work just as well, but it's a little awkward carrying a cellphone that isn't a cellphone anymore, if you decide not to pay a monthly fee.

Some of us refuse to get hooked into a cellphone world. I am reachable by phone at home, and in my cubicle at work. Otherwise, I like the idea that no yakky relatives or friends can intrude.

Contradictory Findings = Shitty review

[rsborg]

PocketPC:
2. It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.

PalmOS:
11. Palm devices are usually more stylish than PocketPCs.

So which really matters? Modern vs. Stylish? WTF?

Also the reviewer seems to be biased towards PocketPCs since he ignores the fact that PalmOS supports MS Office better than the PocketPC (a la Documents toGo)
Also notice the link to PocketPC freeware at the bottom of the page, but no similar link to PalmOS freeware (which there is more of!).

Re:Meh?

[biglig2]

Ah, the dilemma, use my mod points or post?

Anyway, you've hit on one of the things that baffles me most about PalmOne's current strategy. The Palm V form factor is the best that anyone has come up with for a PDA, without question. so how come Palm, and for that matter anyone else, don't make a unit that shape and size any more?

Gaming on Pocket PC

[David Horn]

[Shameless plug]

If you're into (or even slightly interested in) gaming on the Pocket PC, http://www.pocketgamer.org/ is a great place to start, featuring the latest gaming news, reviews, free games to be won, extensive listings... and plenty more besides. :-)

[/Shameless plug]

Re:Alternate conclusion

[nxtw]

Well, the PSP locks you into MPEG4 and Sony's Memory Stick crap. And it definitely doesn't have good WiFi/Bluetooth support...

I don't even consider my Pocket PC an organizer; I consider it a pocket computer. It has excellent WiFi support; I can access my IMAP4 mailbox, most websites (with Flash support), IRC, AIM, and stream audio. Pocket PCs have been capable of doing all of these things for quite some time. I can also multitask. I have MiniStumbler on it, the pocket version of NetStumbler.

If you want an organizer, a cheap Palm will work. But if you buy a Pocket PC because it is actually a portable device that does many things a PC can, then you definitely don't want a Palm.

Neither, bring back the Newton

[xirtam_work]

I've used both PocketPC (or WinCE as it was) and Palm. Both have their problems. just a few of them pointed out by the article. What I really want is a brand new Newton from Apple. The original Newtons were lightyears ahead of their time and can still hold their own today. I think the problem with the Newton was everyone concentrated on the handwriting recognition, easy to understand it was the only machine of it's type available and the handwriting interface was the primary method for inputting information. But if you look at how people use PDA's these days it's mainly for brief notetaking and looking up info, not writing esays on. Another problem with the original Newton's was the size of the thing, now they'd be able to make a smaller model with a higher resolution screen and more compact battery more easily (not saying that I wouldn't be up for a sub-notebook sized Newton that doesn't fit in my pocket for reading off as well or instead of the pocket sized one - hell make both!).

Apple could easily steal the entire PDA market from Palm and the PocketPC folks by bringing out a decent colour version of the NewtonOS on modern hardware that plays videos, works with a digital camera and works like an iPod. Just use the same principles as OS X design.... shiney, easy to use, comes with InkWell already and a Darwin/BSD/Unix/whatever core underneath (hey aren't Palm working on a Linux underneath PalmOS machine???). Especailly with them getting into bed with Intel recently, it could use the XScale.

I've downloaded the Einstein Newton emulator but sadly can't use it as I'm missing the NewtonOS ROM, I don't have a Newton to copy it from :-( I used a friends Newton for a short time and loved it. If anyone has the ROM...... you know what to do. testrobotSPAMSPAMSPAM@gmail.com

Re:palm stuff not quite accurate

[nxtw]

Agreed--the built-in ones aren't great. But again third-party stuff comes to the rescue. Lubak's Fonts4OS5 provides a bunch of beautiful bitmapped fonts (but not antialiased), while (to give a plug for my own commercial stuff) my own FontSmoother provides antialiased (admittedly, grayscale only) smooth fonts (converted from TTF/Type1 via two different GPL converters, though FontSmoother itself is shareware and closed source).

My Pocket PC has built-in antialiased fonts with ClearType.

Actually, non-hackish applications can be installed directly on a flash card without any utilities, though any databases that they use will have to be in RAM unless the app is designed to use databases in flash or unless you use a third-party utility.

My Pocket PC can execute programs right off of a SD card. Most Pocket PC programs use files that can be saved anywhere. Palm OS has some difficulties, due to its usage of "databases" instead of an actual filesystem.

I don't know the PPC world at all, but under PalmOS most crashes aren't a big deal--the system just resets and ten to twenty seconds later you're back up and running. Of course a really bad bug can cause nastier things (reset loops, hard resets, etc.), but that I assume can happen on any platform.

It's rare that my Pocket PC ever freezes, so I rarely even have to reset the thing.

Switch?

[tyler_larson]

I've been a Palm person myself: I owned the Pilot 5000 Professional (back when it was USRobotics--still works), the Palm III (from 3Com), the Palm Vx, the Palm m505, a Toshiba PocketPC (kept it only 2 months), the Palm Tungsten T, the Palm Tungsten W, and now own an HP rx3715 iPAQ.

Interestingly enough, I like the HP a lot more than the equivalently price Palm. The hardware speed has finally caught up to the software, and all those "cool features" like handwriting recognition finally actually work well enough to be useful. Palms have gotten larger, and PocketPCs have gotten smaller, so size is no longer an issue for me. For the first time, I've found that I can be as productive with my iPAQ as I can with a similar Palm device.

I picked the iPAQ because the competitors in the Palm arena have gotten just too expensive for the features when compared to PocketPCs. And until the situation improves for Palm, I'm sticking with what I've got.

Re:My nitpicks

[nxtw]

That only matters if you're running multiple applications at once. Not something you usually do on a PDA.

You can play music and do other things at the same time. I like doing that. You can also get on AIM or IRC while surfing the Web. Or (my favorite) play Bejeweled or surf the Web while you should be doing something else, and easily switch between them.

Cleartype is kind of secondary, since Palm doesn't even support vector fonts. But when your screen is only big for maybe 20 words of text, bitmap fonts are perfectly fine.

If you're reading webpages or actually looking at the screen for more than a few seconds at a time, this becomes very useful. It makes a pretty big difference.

Fast processors are not desirable for PDAs. They drain the battery, and all they're really good for is heavy-duty gaming.

Wrong. Fast CPUs are needed to render complex webpages, to render JPEGs, etc. If all you need is basic organizer functionality, slow CPUs are fine. But these fast CPUs do not necessarily drain the battery (they scale back to slower speeds, like modern laptop CPUs, and many new CPUs are more powerful while using less power than their predecessors.)

Given the size of a PDA screen, there's not a lot you can do with that extra resolution.

320x240 is a significant increase over 160x160. The difference between resolutions may not *seem* like that much, but after actually using the larger one, you'll wonder how you ever survived with a smaller resolution.

Mine is "a simple API that's well documented and well suited to the job at hand." Good PDA apps are not shrunken desktop apps!

I don't see much of an argument there. From what I've heard, the PalmOS API is fairly archaic.

As for .NET -- if you consider that a must-have for developement, there's not a lot I can say!

I guess you've never used .NET, or have such a closed mind that you'll say bad things about Microsoft products no matter what. Also, are any of those alternative development environments you talk about fully-featured e.g. can you write a full-featured application in them? do you get access to most (if not all) of the host APIs?

Again, I prefer a separate device. Digital voice recorders are not expensive.

That's a weak argument. PalmOS _does not_ have this capability in many devices. I find it extremely useful that I can just start recording on my Pocket PC or on my cellphone. Then, I can easily copy that to my PC (on the PPC) or email it to myself (on the cellphone).

And Palm hardware prices go down too.

A Pocket PC will do more for the money.

For some stupid reason, a hard reset doesn't accomplish this: you have to open up the system and disconnect the battery.

I'm glad my Pocket PC has an easily-removable, user replacable battery.

Still, I probably won't switch to PPC systems -- as bad as Palm has gotten, anything from Microsoft has to be 10 times more buggy.

You can be closed-minded like that if you like, but I've found that my Pocket PCs are overall less buggy. I like the choice of input methods, too.

Re:I've used palm and I've been very happy...

[_ph1ux_]

Travelling Sales and Executives (not to mention IT) arent necessarily any harder on these things that normal, but due to how heavily we use the treos they go through a lot of wear and tear.

A short list of many of the problems we have seen with the Treo 600 and 650s:

- Screens go bad or blank.
- Unit will not power on even though battery is nown good
- Horrendous screeching during phone calls
- Calls being dropped after 3 or 4 seconds (*every* call)
- Unit contiuallly turns off "Wireless Mode" (the cell phone feature) without interaction from or notification to the user
- Touch screen is unresponsive

I would say that those problems cover about 80% of what we see, but there are all sorts of other issues that have come up.

I really like the form factor of the Treo, except the 600 keyboard is terrible - the keys require a lot of prseeure to depress and they are small and slippery little dome dome shapes, resultling in too many typos.. but the phone asa complete device is just way too immature.

Re:Alternate conclusion

[Ratbert42]

I'm on my second Palm (a Zire 71 now). I don't use it for email or web browsing now because this model isn't great for WiFi. But I have done both with it on dialup and it does work. I'd still rather have a full keyboard and large screen.

On my Palm, I keep my non-work calendar, read ebooks, listen to MP3s, edit text files and play games. I regularly hand it to my kids to keep them occupied for 10 minutes or so (the older one with games, the younger one with a rip of a Sesame Street video). I keep a large SD card in it that also acts as my USB key (with a Bonzai SD card reader).

I travelled recently for work for the first time in years and I couldn't believe I used to travel without a device like this. Wakeup call? My Palm alarm wakes me up every time. A long delay in Atlanta? I spent it listening to MP3's and reading Return of the King. In-flight I could use my Palm and enjoy a drink without even putting down the tray table.