Thursday, January 19, 2006

Good bye, Palm! Hello, Pocket PC!

Ok, so, at last, it happened! After using Palms for 8 years (or even more – I’ve bought the very first model, the one without the backlight) I betrayed them and switched to the Pocket PC. The reasons for this heinous act were multiple, but they all boiled down to one: for last couple of years I was looking for a new Palm, and was completely disappointed with the new Palm devices.

I remember several years ago I was making fun of my PPC-enthusiastic friends. I laughed when they were carefully putting their bulky devices into special cases, while I easily and elegantly slipped my sleek Palm into my shirt pocket. I laughed sarcastically at the stories about registry problems. I criticized ugly and cumbersome Windows CE interface, showing my friends the simple beauty of Palm.

But time flies – and soon I’ve noticed that PPCs are becoming thinner and smaller; that the screen of the newest devices supports VGA resolution; that the UI becomes more and more elegant. Then my friend bought a Pocket PC which had both WiFi and Bluetooth (my palm had only Bluetooth), slots for both SD and CompactFlash cards (mine had only SD slot – and at the same time the dimensions of his new machine were just a little bit larger than the size of my beloved Palm.

And Palm Inc…. Well, I don’t know what they were thinking about. Probably, they were too preoccupied with Treo – which is really a nice device, but I don’t like combining phones and PDAs together. Anyway, for quite some time their newest and most powerful devices didn’t support WiFi (all but a few models), didn’t provide dual flash card slots… And slowly, I stopped believing in Palm.

Well, now I’ve got Dell Axim x51v. I know, that quite recently Palm has released Palm TX – the model which has both WiFi and Bluetooth. It still has only 320 x 480 display, supports only SD cards – but I hope that people at Palm recognized their faults and soon will release new models which will be on par with Pocket PCs. Then maybe I will come back… And meanwhile I will have to learn how to use my new gadget.


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