On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 11:23:08AM -0500, Bradly J. Barton wrote:
> the IIIc .. it is a comparison by him of the IIIc (my favorite forgotten
> stepchild of the Palm line) and the HP Journada 545:
>
> http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20000907S0004
HP might want to shorten it to the 'nada 545. It may go the way of
the nino.
The iPAQ would have been more interesting if he could have gotten one.
As far as I can tell, it is the only Pocket Windows device with any
mindshare.
That said, they are in short supply (maybe their greater number of and
more complex parts like the screen and flash chips is the problem).
Then you need to add some more if you want the CF adaptor ($39, but
they have a $39 rebate) or others.
When you compare the two technologically, they must be pushing it to
sell them at $500, while Palm has various devices starting at 1/3 the
price.
Remembering back to the late '80s, the Amiga was more advance than the
Atari, which was arguably better than the Mac, and all used the 68000
chip which blew away the silly 286 on the IBM PC.
Which chip won?
And this was the more clunky DOS + proprietary graphics interface
beating MacOS, GEM, and Amiga's OS. MacOS is still around and still
better (PPC+MacOS is better, but if you just look at MHz, the higher
clocking Athlon which is functionally slower sounds faster).
Someone else noted that Microsoft gets the third revsion right,
e.g. Windows 3.0. But there wasn't much competition, especially not a
competeting product with a majority market share. So this CE revision
is less bad enough to be tolerable, but meanwhile people haven't
waited.
PalmOS is simpler, but does everything you need in a GUI. And nothing
you don't. And as I've been suggesting, they could get 99% of the
functionality of the faster devices by going up a step or two in micro
cores (68010,EC020,EC030,CPU32+) and adding a DSP (which would be off
most of the time) and maybe a DMA controller or something more
intelligent for graphics. Palm software that starts in a breath would
start in a blink, and you could do all the stupid multimedia tricks.
(According to the Palm SW Evangelist who spoke at our local PUG, they
haven't decided to go with the ARM - it is still being looked at; one
of my responses was to suggest they port and sell PalmOS+POSE for the
iPAQ so they would have something useful to run and make Palm a few
extra dollars).
Palm has to defend its turf, but I think it is doing the right things
overall. And it is much easier to defend than to attack. And so far
Palm has seemed to ignore Microsoft (note the lack of "we're really
better" ads) and hasn't tried to fight on Microsoft's terms. Not that
they aren't fighting, but Microsoft has to figure a way to undermine
the Palm Economy citadel, while Palm simply has to keep it inviting to
its users and developers. Not that they do everything right, but more
than enough so people don't think of anything else but Palm for PDA.
Even the CE devices are not quite thought of as PDAs like palms - more
as sub-sub notebooks (One less W98 or 2K license?). iPaq owners don't
talk about the datebook or address book, or calculator.
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