>Guffaw!!! The $150 palm is hardly at rock bottom. You can get some
>idea of the chips and prices and I assume you can use pocket excel.
And to add another exclamation mark, many companies are exploring the
viability of marketing nearly "free" Palms, purely for the advertising
exposure that having a little nagging advertisement can potentially
bring (not to mention the negative, but we wander off the trail there).
>[Don't discount this. When hardware is $20, and an OS license is $30,
>it makes a huge difference - so how do you build a $250 unit if the
>hardware costs $225 and you have to pay $30 to Microsoft? - Eric
>Raymond mentioned in his MacHack keynote - as to why there isn't any
>$350 or below platform that runs a Microsoft OS]
>
>They aren't demanding color and sound as much as they are asking for
>multimedia. The Pocket PC isn't killing the MP3 player market, and I
>can't play DVDs or any other hard media in a pocket PC.
Not to mention the point of sale market. When you go into your local
supermarket, are they running Windows 98 on a Gateway? Usually, it's
an OS/2 or DOS variant on an IBM or somesuch. The thing is, where
reliability, quickness, and efficiency matter, the Palm is far superior
to the CE or PPC. Do you want your workers out in the warehouse watching
movies during inventory? Would you want your units to lose power half
way through inventory day, and be forced to have a "recharge break"?
How about if you're a travelling salesman, and you just made a sale, and
you're about to take down the information, but you forgot to recharge it
yesterday (even though your handheld was charged just 24 hours before).
Not to mention the "lets boot up and wait sequence". Or perhaps "lets
watch it crash and lose all our collected warehouse data". Every client
I've talked to doesn't need a media player, they don't need to download
attachments. They want a simple, hassle-free solution that is quick and
easy to use. They want to push a button, scan a code, show some text,
then save it to a database. PalmOS does this exceedingly well.
-Rus
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