On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 03:20:34PM -0400, JB Parrett wrote:
> I think the 'users' in this particular case are the distributors and
> technology writers, more than folks wandering the isles at Fry's and
> Staples. I hear people in this forum and technology pundits calling
> for color, but they use all the latest gizmos: I don't believe
> they/we accurately represent what the largest percentage of the
> potential market wants - simplicity.
I haven't seen very many pocket calculators that do color, nor do most
people fill out information in their Franklin (or other) Planners in
color. In fact, most word processing documents and PDFs are in black
and white, maybe with an occasional color picture. The killer apps
don't need or use color.
Not to say that color isn't a good thing, but it needs more CPU
cycles, bus bandwidth and a fancier (read: expensive and power
consuming) LCD, so there are tradeoffs. Maybe not in 5-10 years, but
right now the palm is extremely well balanced. The Palm V is sleek on
the outside, but the PalmOS is even sleeker on the inside. Even the
color Palm isn't going for the glitz. Color is used only where there
is value added.
(So the PocketPC development environment is free - can you emulate on
the Windows machine? Can you remove the extra junk it inserts for
doing the CE version of syncing? How many executables do you need if
you want full coverage, or did they standardize on one processor? Did
they document the APIs and are they frozen or will they mutate?).
FYI - Microsoft included a CE development environment including 4 CDs
in every issue of Embedded Systems a while back and most engineers I
know threw them out without looking at them.
Microsoft is starting to get it, but I don't think quite has got it.
They keep going toward Palm, but never get there because they are
trying to use a heavyweight GUI based OS with realtime shoehorned in.
Elegance, Simplicity, WinCE: Pick 2.
And since they can't make it work like a palm, they add hardware and
software to make it do a mediocre job of things like MP3 and word
processing (The palmtop is good for memos and doodling, but nothing
fancier, and for that the microlaptops which run real windows and win
apps do much better jobs).
Someone else mentioned apps. Sorry, palm wins (if you will excuse the
pun) hands down. One or two big name apps won't save the PocketPC,
you need a thousand good niche apps and palm has that with their
thousands of developers.. Even Windows would die if it could run ONLY
Microsoft Office and little third party software.
Microsoft is in the Catch-22 - they won't have a lot of developers
until they have a lot of users, and they won't have a lot of users
until there are a lot of applications.
And from my perspective, why shouldn't I wait until the next
"reference" PocketPC platform that will have twice the memory and cpu
speed as current models (every software revision seems to change the
hardware significantly)? PalmOS is still PalmOS, and even the changes
haven't been that radical.
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