by mlepage » Jan 6, 2004 @ 6:47pm
I don't know what's going on with companies.
I hada Palm V because they are nice, but eventually it became outdated. I wanted colour, big screen, multimedia, more expandability, and the Pocket PCs looked quite nice.
It seemed that the Pocket PC was pushing in all the areas Palm had become lax in over the years. So I switched, thinking Microsoft was on the ball with everything.
I got an iPAQ 3970 pretty much the week they came out. It was hella expensive, but it had the options I wanted and the best screen, and was supposed to be blazing fast with the 400MHz XScale. I liked it.
Of course the performance was crippled because of a bus speed issue. So I got sucked on my first Pocket PC purchase. I spent more than a laptop for a device that had a serious flaw, when I could have got a cheaper one, then a better one a year later. Live and learn. At least Pocket PC was going places.
But it's been about two years now, and I haven't seen any real development. Where are the bigger screens? Palm has them now. Where's all the wireless connectivity? I have Bluetooth built in, but there doesn't seem to be much to do with it. Where's the gaming support? First we had button press issues, we still have d-pads that suck, and now we have MediaQ chips which cannot blit worth beans, and the stylus eats processor cycles just by using it.
Microsoft just doesn't seem to be pushing the Pocket PC platform in new directions. I thought they'd take on Palm head on, but they seem content to languish in second place. Gaming is not a priority, when it is important just to push the hardware. Where are the OS updates? Where are the DirectX libraries?
I'd guess that Microsoft is just focusing on the XDA, the tablet, and the smart phone. But does it really make sense to ignore the PDA market?
You know what I think? I think that Microsoft has a PDA platform just to have one.... nothing more. You see, Palm's raison d'etre is PDA: that's what it is. Microsoft is so many other things, for them PDA is just an afterthought. They just want to be able to say they have a PDA platform, and well, they do. It just doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
