.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE SENIOR TECHNICAL EDITOR
.TITLE Why buy a PDA?
.AUTHOR Claire Pieterek
.SUMMARY Senior Technical Editor Claire Pieterek had a friend in need. Her friend’s company was phasing out her position, requiring that she return her company-issued iPAQ. After fixing her friend up with a CLIE, Claire had to ask herself what the real point was in getting a PDA. With the functions on PDAs and mobile phones merging, why buy a PDA? And which one will come out on top in the end?
.OTHER
I had a friend in need. Her company had just told her they’d be phasing out her position in six months, so she was leery of entering any information on the company-issued iPAQ she’d been using. I had three Sony CLIEs sitting on my desk, so I packed up my trusty PEG-N710C, Memory Stick and all, and gave her a quick tutorial on New Year’s Day. She had no problems picking up good old Graffiti, and she was off like a flash.
This got me to thinking: I need to get her something to replace the N710C, but what? I don’t care much for the "slider" design of the Tungsten T3. It just doesn’t say "durable" to me. The 90-day warranty on the Tungsten E makes that one another no-go. Doesn’t palmOne believe in its products any more, or do they just not care?
.CALLOUT Doesn’t palmOne believe in its products any more, or do they just not care?
The Wi-Fi implementation on the Tungsten C is pretty lame–I’d rather buy an Asus MyPal A730W. There are a lot more interesting things I could do with that, and most of those are stories for another day. The Tungsten T5 doesn’t seem like a great deal for the money given the prices that jump drives are going for nowadays. Come on guys, flash memory is pretty cheap these days. And what about Palm OS 6? The Zire 72 is OK, but about the only thing that model has going for it is a $50 rebate, and it doesn’t come with any of the business software that she would need, like Documents to Go.
.BREAK_EMAIL You’ll have to click here to find out why you should or shouldn’t buy a PDA.
PalmOne needs some competition, and I don’t mean Microsoft. Maybe the Treo killed off the Visor when Handspring was still a separate company. It seems to me the Treo is now killing off whatever innovation is left in Palm hardware design land. Sony has departed these shores and retreated back to its native land, where the CLIE has recently been given the sack. So, it looks like we’re on to the smartphone wars: Symbian vs. Palm OS vs. Microsoft, and whatever the Japanese decide they might care to send our way.
As a Japanophile, I have seen what phones can do. Japanese mobile phones make American cell phones look like Fisher-Price toys in terms of size and capability. However, their networks are a lot more advanced than ours, and they don’t have as many competitive disadvantages to overcome. There are only three major carriers in Japan, and they have far less ground to cover than American carriers.
I’m a T-Mobile customer, so I carry a GSM telephone. GSM phones have SIM (Subscriber Information Module) cards inside. Without a SIM card, a GSM phone is just a paperweight. It has no information about the carrier, your plan, or any of the other things it needs to join the network. The nice thing is, if you can get your phone unlocked, you can go to many other countries (except Japan, where GSM isn’t used), buy prepaid SIM cards from local carriers and make relatively cheap local calls instead of running up huge bills roaming on your own carrier.
Nonetheless, today’s cell phones are usurping many of the functions of PDAs. Although I don’t use my cell phone for these things, it offers a date book, to do list, and voice memo functions–sound familiar? Problem is, it won’t sync up with anything else I have, so what good is it? And, if the battery runs out, I’d say goodbye to my data, unless it’s stored in the SIM card. I admit, I don’t know where it goes. There are no sync cables or software available for it, so I bought a SIM card reader from ThinkGeek just in case.
I think we’re starting to see the long, slow death of the PDA as a separate device. In a few years, I believe most of us will be carrying around mobiles with an operating system that’ll handle all of the functionality of our PDAs, and all of the telephony services of our mobile phones. This is what the network bidding battles were about in Europe; this is what the phones and networks do today in Japan. So why buy a PDA? I don’t think I can answer that question today.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the HP iPAQ, visit http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/handheld.html.
For more information on the palmOne products, visit http://www.palmone.com/us/.
For more information on the Asus MyPal, visit http://usa.asus.com/products/pda/pdaindex.htm.
For more information on ThinkGeek, visit http://www.thinkgeek.com/.
For more information on T-Mobile, visit http://www.tmobile.com/.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
