On 11/6/06, Voytek Eymont <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have been a long time PDA user, largely for reasons you mentioned, every time I was considering new hardware, that exactly why I always ended up going for PDA-only
I wish I'd gone down that path myself. I've wasted $2K messing about with smartphones.
(hmm, 'largely' or 'exactly' ? I'm not precisely certain anymore..) (though, number of my friends moved from Palm PDA to PDA/phone combos, wince variety, they swear by them, (and often, swear at them))
Symbian is probably the biggest problem for Smartphones. If they ran a decent implementation of Linux or BSD and had some kind of multiUI toolkit, then companies could actually develop for a consistent platform and not worry that they would need to rewrite software for the next version. Symbian's major flaw is that there are too many versions: Series 60: covers most of the sophisticated phones that still loon like phones Series 80 (640x200 widescreen, option keys and QWERTY): the Nokia Communicators Series 90 (640x320 touchscreen): the Nokia 7710 UIQ: (240x320 touchscreen): Sony Ericsson P800, P900, P910, and possibly a few others. Applications need to be rewritten to work on different devices and it's a PITA. HandyDay was one of the best programs for the P910i that I had. A series 90 version was going to be made, but the developer never ended up doing it, so obviously there's some non-trivial work that needed to be done.
the other aspect that I think was missed so far: I really prefer to have WiFi before I have GPRS, do the wince PDA/phones include WiFi ?
Some do. Nokia has a fair few out now that do. The Sony Ericsson P990 will, but it may not be released in Australia. It's usually just 802.11b, which is fair enough, but the main problem is actually doing anything useful with it. Getting QoS to work for VoIP is very difficult. PDAs should be much more flexible in this area, since there's fewer OSs and more hacks. One other option is to get a decent PDA with CF or USB functionality and get a GSM card/dongle for it (but drivers will probably only be available for the Native OS) Ben -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
