I currently own a handspring 2 ipaqs and a sharp zaurus.
You will find that the palm OS based systems are very organizer focused,
and although they can and do do other things, that are more of an
electronic organizer... which is what they are ment for, so there is
nothing wrong with that.
The Pocket PC platform is very nice. The hardware is much faster than
most of the palm stuff out there, and is a little more like a hand held
laptop. The apps that it runs tend to be much larger and a lot more
feature rich, but that means they take more memory, but luckily the
pocketPC devices have a lot more.
The down side to these devices is that there are almost no
freebee/public domain software available, so right after you get it, you
will have to pay bucks for all the software that you can load onto a
palm based device for free. They also really HATE to be hooked to
anything other than a windows based OS, and I found it annoying that
most software packages installed something into my windows box as well
as on the pocketPC device. That just adds to the crap I don't need or
want on my system.
I just thought I would throw in a little something about the zaurus real
quick, although I doubt you will get one of these.
The zaurus is by far my favorite PDA that I have owned. It's Based off
the same hardware platform that most Pocket PC devices are built off of.
Mainly because it has completely replaced my laptop. The zaurus is a
linux based PDA that can run pretty much anything that you would run on
your linux desktop machine. I've run web servers, full office suites,
full database servers...etc...etc It also makes a very nice PDA with
all the bells and whistles of the Pocket PC, but with non of the huge
overhead of haveing to buy tons of applications... just select what you
want and it installs itself.
Also a quick note.. the iPaq can easily have linux loaded onto it with
the same environment that the zaurus has, but I only recommend it for
the more geeky audience.
In the end if you are only planning on storing some addresses and some
caches and play a little Mahjong, you should go with a palm based
system, it's not going to be worth your money to get the faster hardware.
If you are looking to replace a lot of what you are doing with your
laptop and don't mind shelling out bucks to do it, then go PocketPC.
If you want to do everything your desktop machine is doing, and you have
linux experience, then definetely go with the zaurus, or an ipaq with
the familiar distribution from
www.handhelds.org loaded onto it.
Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek
Geeky Type
Bill Tomlinson wrote:
> I don't have any experience with the Sony, so I can't help there. I have
> used both the Palm 5 and Compaq iPaq. I'm probably in the minority, but I
> prefer the Windows Pocket PC OS to the Palm OS. I use my iPaq a lot.
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