I have been following the emails regarding the WinCE PDAs. Some of them very
interesting and informative.
As a result, I investigated about the HP's PDA with WinCE, and about the free
development system.
I can tell you that Microsoft is doing exactly what it needs to get out of the
catch-22 trap referred to by a previous email.
The free dev system is very tempting to us developers, to "adapt" our Palm
applications to WinCE.
This strategy will dramatically increase the number of applications for their PDAs.
On the hardware side, maybe HP's PDA is not currently competitive to the Palm.
But you should not under-estimate the engineering capacity of HP or anybody else to
improve their PDAs, taking the best ideas they already see working for the Palm. I
don't think Palm's engineers are any different than HP's.
Only issue I see with WinCE is that they will almost certainly need more memory to do
the same job, because PalmOS is inherently more memory efficient.
In terms of cost, that might translate to about $50-$100 more.
On a $500 system, that may not be an issue to the consumer.
One inherent advantage of WinCE, from what I could investigate, is that it handles the
same familiar apps like Excel, Word, etc. so the user could be able to directly
transfer information between his PC and PDA.
That may be a big plus for the users, specially as memory cost per megabyte lowers.
Just my 2 cents.
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