Okay, I can buy the "just an electronic organizer" argument for users who purchase the low-end ( = $250 ) Palm and Handspring devices. (To be honest, I'm considering purchasing one of the m100's for just that, because my Cassiopeia is just too big and heavy to carry around at work.) But what about the high-end Palms, like the new Palm VIIx with a $450-$500 price tag, or the Palm V, which isn't far behind? They sell $100 keyboards for these things. Somehow I don't envision the users who purchase these higher-end models as people who want just an electronic organizer. As for the "PocketPC's are toys" argument... Before M$ started loading the Pocket Office apps with CE 3.0, I probably would have agreed with that statement. But I really believe that having those apps adds a lot to the overall work potential of these devices, especially for travelling users. My job doesn't require me to travel, but it's not difficult to see the utility of having a palm-sized device that can perform all the functions of a PDA, combined with Internet access (CF modem or CF ethernet card), Microsoft Office-compatible applications, and entertainment features (PocketPC's have some *awesome* games, check www.jimmy.com for examples) for the travelling user. As for the lack of a keyboard...Calligrapher (www.paragraph.com) does a fantastic job at handwriting recognition, plus it has a decent on-screen keyboard, so unless you're composing vast amounts of text, I really don't see that as a fatal flaw.
Okay, I realize this is probably massive flame-bait, but all the palmtop WinCE devices (CE 2.11 and PocketPC) have had this capability for a while. There were/are several MP3 players around that work on these, the newest and most noteworthy being Windows Media Player (which is free). It also plays WMA files, which, for all practical purposes, are much better suited to this application ("this application" being playing music on a storage-constrained device--WMA files tend to sound a bit better than MP3 files at lower bitrates and frequencies, allowing smaller file sizes). Right now on my Cassiopeia E-100 (still running CE 2.11), I've got 18 WMA files, all encoded at 40KBps and 32KHz, taking up a total of 24MB (stored on a 64MB CF card). These are all 3+ minute songs, and they average around 1.3MB each. They sound pretty good over headphones. They don't sound as good as the original 128K MP3's, but we're not talking about a high-quality audio playback device, either.
That being said, I really don't understand the infatuation with PalmOS devices. I've really wanted to understand it, and I've done a lot of reading trying to figure out why these devices are so enormously popular (thinking that they must in some way be superior to the WinCE devices). I keep coming up with nothing. Can somebody out there explain why the/. crowd likes these things over the CE devices without falling back on the old "M$ sucks!" argument?
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Okay, I can buy the "just an electronic organizer" argument for users who purchase the low-end ( = $250 ) Palm and Handspring devices. (To be honest, I'm considering purchasing one of the m100's for just that, because my Cassiopeia is just too big and heavy to carry around at work.) But what about the high-end Palms, like the new Palm VIIx with a $450-$500 price tag, or the Palm V, which isn't far behind? They sell $100 keyboards for these things. Somehow I don't envision the users who purchase these higher-end models as people who want just an electronic organizer. As for the "PocketPC's are toys" argument... Before M$ started loading the Pocket Office apps with CE 3.0, I probably would have agreed with that statement. But I really believe that having those apps adds a lot to the overall work potential of these devices, especially for travelling users. My job doesn't require me to travel, but it's not difficult to see the utility of having a palm-sized device that can perform all the functions of a PDA, combined with Internet access (CF modem or CF ethernet card), Microsoft Office-compatible applications, and entertainment features (PocketPC's have some *awesome* games, check www.jimmy.com for examples) for the travelling user. As for the lack of a keyboard...Calligrapher (www.paragraph.com) does a fantastic job at handwriting recognition, plus it has a decent on-screen keyboard, so unless you're composing vast amounts of text, I really don't see that as a fatal flaw.
Okay, I realize this is probably massive flame-bait, but all the palmtop WinCE devices (CE 2.11 and PocketPC) have had this capability for a while. There were/are several MP3 players around that work on these, the newest and most noteworthy being Windows Media Player (which is free). It also plays WMA files, which, for all practical purposes, are much better suited to this application ("this application" being playing music on a storage-constrained device--WMA files tend to sound a bit better than MP3 files at lower bitrates and frequencies, allowing smaller file sizes). Right now on my Cassiopeia E-100 (still running CE 2.11), I've got 18 WMA files, all encoded at 40KBps and 32KHz, taking up a total of 24MB (stored on a 64MB CF card). These are all 3+ minute songs, and they average around 1.3MB each. They sound pretty good over headphones. They don't sound as good as the original 128K MP3's, but we're not talking about a high-quality audio playback device, either. That being said, I really don't understand the infatuation with PalmOS devices. I've really wanted to understand it, and I've done a lot of reading trying to figure out why these devices are so enormously popular (thinking that they must in some way be superior to the WinCE devices). I keep coming up with nothing. Can somebody out there explain why the /. crowd likes these things over the CE devices without falling back on the old "M$ sucks!" argument?