In this month's edition of Letters to the Editor, we received some interesting thoughts on what Palm can do to improve. Naturally, we also got quite a few responses to last month's editorial by David Gewirtz entitled, "The morbid fascination that is Palm, Inc.," at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200209/ppeditorial0902001.html.
A better PDA
This is intended as a letter to the editor to address hardware developments at Palm. I own a Palm Vx handheld PDA, which I think has been a fantastic tool. Several friends have now gotten Compaq iPaqs as they run Windows CE and are easy to use. However, they are bulky, and I suspect Windows CE is a lot slower and less robust than the Palm operating system.
I now want to get the next generation Palm handheld with the following improvements:
- Color: Why? Because I want to display photos from my digital camera on the Palm handheld. Ideally, it should have a reasonable color display (say 420 x 360 minimum and a large format).
- Sound: I want to play MPEG files with high quality.
- A lock: This is so I don't accidentally turn it on when it's in my pocket--the Palm m515 still does this.
- Good battery life: Ideally, it should be as good as my Palm Vx, not bad like the Compaq device.
- Compact flash 1 and 2 compatibility: Basically, I want to be able to use memory cards from my camera in the PDA (and transfer images from the camera on the move). Also, Compact flash 2 means I could go whole hog and put a microdrive in the PDA and expand the memory to gigabytes.
- Good communication: This would be via infrared and Bluetooth (when available) and connectivity with the Internet.
- Good included software.
- Small size format.
I have recently seen the Sony CLIE PEG-NR70V with 16MB memory for
