It's not that simple. PocketPC has been superior to Palm devices in every respect since their launch. Palm still owns the hand-held market.

Well, ever since the Pocket PC was released, Palm was loosing a considerable market share to Compaq with the iPaq. Devices before Pocket PC (WinCE 3) were crap though. Bad color screens, bad battery life (the rechargability helped this a bit), and bulky. The OS was still very Windows centric (works well with a keyboard and mouse, and badly with a stylus and small screen), and was also slow on the devices it was sold on.

There will always be a market for a Palm based PDA though. My mother for example. I bought her a Handspring Visor last Christmas because it was all she needed. Basic address book and scheduling capabilities. My iPaq was just too complex for what she needed.

PocketPC didn't run WinCE 1.0 :)

Bruno

I think that was exactly Palm's advantage: it did not try to be a very small PC, but very practical, extendable organizer

Palm m505 costs $399 and iPAQ 3765 is $499. The iPAQ is infinitely better (I own both an m505 and iPAQ 3670).

For $100 difference, there is no question which is the better buy. Palm's problem is they think they can command a lot of money for such a limited platform.

Pity we couldn't buy the empeg design off them and put into production when the world is ready for the leap

This was mentioned already in another thread. It seems that very thought has crossed the mind of at least a couple people in Cambridge. If you think you have access to the resources to do this, you might want to contact them. Be warned, though, that it wasn't easy for Empeg to do it, even when it was their full time job. And I don't know if they were seriously considering releasing the hardware design or not, it was just an off-handed comment in the other thread.

One thing that irritates me about the HSX-109 is the lack of ethernet. SonicBlue makes a VCR with ethernet (ReplayTV 4000) but not a $1499 MP3 player?!?!?! Bah!

I admit that the lack of Ethernet surprised me, too. If it's any consolation, I know that the Cambridge team fought for it. I don't know why the final decision was made to axe it, perhaps Hugo can shed some light on that.

In any case, a $30.00 adapter solved the ethernet problem for me. I know, I know, why spend over a grand on something just so you can go out and spend another $30.00 on a stinking adapter... I don't have an answer for that one. All I know is that it works for me.

I argued for it as strongly as I could while I was there, but as I recall it came down to a cost issue (BOM and schedule hit as it was a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't type feature). Since there were alternatives to access connectivity it became one of those battles that was just not worth fighting.

And then for a device that is positioned in the home audio market (think jacked up CD changer) those type of connections don't make as much sense. But then there is the hacker angle to all this...

I can second this, when I saw my first WinCE machine the interface was awful, with permanent menus taking up large parts of the screen. They had tried to cram the normal Windows interface onto a PDA, which was a bad idea. Compared to the Psion and Palm interfaces at that time the interface was practically unusable (especially as the interface was too much for the hardware it was running on).

When I used a PocketPC device for a few days the other week I had a real shock, the interface is now vastly more usable, mainly thanks to the fact that it no longer tries slavishly copy the Windows interface.

It is true that the Palm interface has changed little in the last few years, but that is because they got it just about right at the outset, so didn't need to fix it. They could do with adding a few more advanced features to some of the apps though.

My favourite PDA interface is still the Psion 3, which is why I have been buying up spare Psion 3c machines now that Psion have stopped making them. I am still waiting for a better PDA than the Psion 3c to come along...

(I can't even buy up Psion 3mx machines, as the added back light layer makes the screen unreadable without the backlight in most indoor situations)

Oops. I thought that PocketPC was their platform name for WinCE-running devices. I stand corrected.

Pocket PC debuted with a new version of CE which dropped the CE name (can't remember which version, but it might have been the Rapier codename). The new moniker came around the begining of 2000 - right when I registered the "mypocket.com" domain name :).

WinCE 1.0 was on HPC (Handheld PCs) - the ones with the keyboard that sucked. At that time I was using a Newton MP2000 which was far and away better than everything else (except for its larger size). Come on, no one that values the excess of the empeg can sit here and tell me they find anything admirable about PALM?

The first hand-held WinCE machines were Palm PC for a brief time - until 3COM said something about the name - at the time, PALM machines were still PALM PILOT - the company was 3COM/PALM, the product was the PILOT. Then the name was changed to Palmtop PC I believe. PPC for short. Does the Philips Nino ring a bell? The Everex Freestyle? I think these ran CE2. Then the first colour units came - I still remember breaking the story on the Compaq Aero for CNet and a well-known PDA site (months before it was released :) These may have been the first with CE3.

Anyway, now I'm dragging it on a bit. I've always disliked Palm's text input plus its wasteful use of screen space (the whole input area toward the bottom). Being used to a Newton, the newer CE machines were starting to "get-it"

And now, like the Newton, all PocketPC machines are using StrongARM. (thought I'd wrap it up on an empeg-esque note :)

Bruno

I know this one's been done to death, but I've got a new twist.

17) Web sites that require that you run a particular set of browsers, despite the fact that other browsers would work fine, and despite the fact that their suggested browsers don't work.

Yep, one time I was just driving along my merry way on a country road, doing nothing wrong, and a police car came up behind me and started tail gating. After some time, the ambient light went down so that you had to turn on your lights, well, this particular police car put his brights on me for a half mile. It made making me extremely paranoid (!) and uncomfortable.

Calvin

I would have lit up my brake lights for him. Just the lights. If he didn't get the drift, then I'd slow down to about 5 mph.

YES, even knowing it was a cop I'd do this. If he pulled me over I'd ask him to radio for another cruiser to come and give him a ticket for following too close.

Keep in mind, I know where I live and I know how the police are around here. I wouldn't try this trick if I was traveling in some parts of the US. Too much chance of getting pulled out of the car and getting pistol-whipped in some places. :)

Bruno

...not to mention the fact that the new versions of PocketPC actually use a licensed version of the same handwriting recognition engine used on the Newton (I used to use a 120 myself, and also tried one of the first CE 1.0 devices -- the Compaq C140, which was a rebadged Casseopeia A11).

And now, not only are they all moving to StrongARM architectures, but they're showing up more and more running some flavor of Linux (e.g., the familiar distro that is Debian-based, which I run on one of my iPaqs, or the QTe/Embedix version that ships on the upcoming Sharp Zaurus SL5500, which has a built-in keyboard and a palm formfactor (I have the developer's version now -- the SL5000D).

What are your impressions on Zaurus - on paper (i.e. Web site) looks quite impressive...

I love it. At conferences last year, I was using my iPaq 3650 running familiar linux, bash, and ssh, a Stowaway keyboard, and a Lucent WaveLAN Gold card with a slim 802.11b external antenna as a replacement for my 8lb notebook. The added mobility was wonderful, and it was a real eye-catcher for folks.

The drawback is that it's very kludgy and carrying it still requires large pockets or a small bag. Setting it up is a bit like assembling a free-standing work of art on-the-fly.


The Zaurus is a streamlined, integrated version of all of this for me. The keyboard mechanism is beautifully-engineered, and strongly resembles the keyboard on the larger BlackBerry (a device I used for about a year, and came to love the keyboard on). I can type very quickly using just my two thumbs, and it feels very natural. When not in use, the sliding mechanism hides it perfectly, and the entire mechanism feels very solid and professional.

The CF and SD slots mean I can use a CF formfactor 802.11b card (I've got a Socket CF card right now, but I'm still working on getting an LKM to support it. They're using a MAC chip that I can't get data on, so I can't finish hacking the spectrum24t KLM to work with it), and use the SD slot for storage expansion.

It comes with bash and vi, which makes me happy. I've got ssh running on it, and Opera's built in. QTe seems very professional, and the licensing doesn't bother me as much as it does some purists I know. As such, it's perfectly suited to this type of device.

The screen is exactly the same as the one used in the iPaq, and is correctly sealed, eliminating the iPaq problem with dust under the screen layers. This makes for a beautiful display.

The only real complaint I could muster right now is the lack of anything beyong simple chirps and beeps for sound reproduction. However, it does have a headphone jack and can feed full sound through those, so it's really not an issue for me. Besides, I use a dedicated portable MP3 player for music (Rio 800 Extreme).

The only functional difference for the way I'm using the devices between this and the iPaq for me is the lack of a PCMCIA slot on the Zaurus (I use a 2GB PCMCIA hard drive on the iPaq for various things, using the dual PCMCIA sleeve so I can also use an 802.11b card). However, the Zaurus more than makes up for it in elegance and functionality.

Now, if I could just find a CF 802.11b card with a jack for an external antenna, I'd be in heaven. I may have to hack one into an existing card, tho.

If you've got to have one now, you won't be disappointed. However, the final consumer release (sometime in April, I believe) will have 64MB RAM; the currently available developer's model only has 32MB RAM.

Wow! Thanks.

18) People on online message boards (not this one!) who (a) post answers to questions that are identical to previous answers, and not just because they were posting at the same time, but, rather, days later, or (b) answer question giving erroneous and possibly dangerous information, without waiting for someone more knowlegable to answer first or even noting that they might be wrong, since they're just guessing, or (c) posting the same question to all of the categories without regard to the subject matter.

...finding out your RC helicopter has a clutch that won't engage AND crashing your new RC plane on the first day you fly it

so it sounds like if we got rid of cars and computers, then the world would be a better place....

I'm not sure which version I had been using, but about 5-6 years ago I had a Compaq Companion (I htink that was the model name) that ran WinCE. I kinda liked it. The only thing that annoyed me was the B&W screen, but there wasn't much you could do about that at the time. The keyboard and touchscreen were pretty easy to use, too, and the screen was a lot bigger than most at the time.

Then about 2 years ago I upgraded to an HP Jornada 820. While it ran on an ARM processor and had a nice color 640X480 screen (and could run DOOM), the interface wasn't really much improved, and the storage space was about the same. I think I sold that last year.

Now I've got a nice REX 6000, which in some ways is inferior to the Compaq I had 5 years ago But it's small and I love it. I don't like palm devices, but more importantly I wouldn't have much use for them.