This article is based on a comparison of my M100 series Palm and my iPAQ 3900.
An entry-level Palm with a not really entry level Compaq. It wouldn't be significative IF the evaluation wasn't systematically oriented toward the little plus that money gives you.
The bottom line: existing Palms make you do character input one way—their way. Pocket PC's give you more options.
Regarding the ease of use of a system, too many options is not always an advantage. Especially with the magnificient "Transcriber" mode, where you can be stuck without being able to act on any control present on the screen. It's NOT easy to use when you have 200 blue points on the screen because of the software deciding that you have not finished to write a word.
Moving around on the screen: The Palm requires you to tap on fields to move around.
False. Read the manual.
The Pocket PC has more data fields for each contact, including room for three different addresses, a variety of additional telephone numbers, multiple e-mail addresses, Web pages, assistant's name, birthday, and more.
That's perhaps why the entry form fills up several screens and you can't even notice where you have to click in order to confirm the contact creation?
Another thing you can do with a Pocket PC is associate a voice note with a contact.
IF it has a microphone, which is not a standard feature.
Yes, the Palm has custom fields that you can use to store a variety of information. But the Pocket PC has a far greater variety of data fields to begin with. You end up putting a lot more miscellaneous information in Palm's Note field.
I've absolutely no note field use for any of my contacts. If one is going to use its address book for "contact market mining", I don't think he/she is going to fell under the scope of "easy to use" for average users.
Both devices allow you to beam contacts to your peers and it's just about as easy to do it on either device.
Except that you must have a recent Pocket PC to be able to share your contacts with other PDAs (Psion, PalmOS, ...), since they are OBEX compliant only since Pocket PC 2002.
Just open the note, hold down the record button on the side of your Pocket PC, and speak into it. And if you're in the middle of something else, you don't even have to open Notes—just hold down the record button and speak. It's a great way to quickly note down a phone number, commitment, idea, etc. Later, you can review the voice memos on your Pocket PC, or sync them with the Notes section in your desktop PC's Outlook.
Again, the microphone is not standard on Pocket PC. And sincerely, who likes to use the Notes section in Outlook? Has anybody seen something crappier?
A while ago I was at Starbucks, using my Pocket PC to catch up on e-mail via Starbucks' Wi-Fi connection. From home, my wife used MSN Messenger to ping me, requesting the e-mail address of a friend (Screen 12). I pressed Chat to respond, opened Contacts and found the e-mail address I needed, copied it to the clipboard, switched back to Chat, pasted it in, and sent it.
I thougt the article was about the ease of use... So, here we have the use of a non standard extension, to go with the virus catcher MSN, launch 3 or 4 applications and? I guess the next step is to invoke the 3 steps magical incantation which brings you to the "running programs" panel in order to kill the sucker which makes your Pocket PC with a 400MHz processor to feel like a Psion 3 and its 7.68 Mhz processor. This is what I find great with WindowsCE multitasking. No matter what you do, it will end up sucking all the resources, and either you are a power user (out of the scope of this article) and you can kill the faulty program while praying for not losing data, either you reboot (aka "The Micro$oft way").
And when you get into more sophisticated operations, such as e-mailing documents, creating spreadsheets, playing music, storing information on a memory storage card, synchronizing files, connecting to your LAN, etc., it is clear which device is really easier to use.
Notebook anyone? I sincerily have sorrow for the poor guy who has only a Pocket PC for doing all its productive tasks. Editing a spreadsheet on a poor 240x320 screen cluttered with toolbars (and don't even start to try to hide them, you won't be able to access any useful function quickly) is really a curse. I guess it's time for him to find a better job. Or perhaps I'm wrong and I should tell my girlfriend that she MUST create a spreadsheet on a memory card in order to have a file to synchronize with something else... Ease of use? What are the requirement? I mean, where is the need to have a Pocket PC? With the size of an iPAQ 3900, which is too big to be manipulated with one hand, the requirements are: a plane surface, an external source of energy when you are connected to a LAN, a keyboard in order to do this contact mining...
Which brings us back to where this whole thing started: the statement that "Consumers (are) better served by Palm OS-based devices, which are easier to operate and less expensive."
Hogwash!
Less expensive: still true. "Easier to operate": the only conclusions brought by this article are that you can turn your Pocket PC in a bad subnotebook. One thing is sure, I will never have a daily use of an iPAQ 3900: try to read the news on it with one hand, the other one clutched to a pole in the subway. Not possible.
