6.8 Palm Pilots

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People often ask whether the Pocket PC is better than the Palm Pilot family of portable computers. The answer is not simple, because it all depends on what you want the device to do. The Palm Pilot is tremendously popular and traditionally outsells other handheld computers by a considerable factor, perhaps as a reflection of the slowness and lack of capability, including applications, of the original versions of the Pocket PC software and hardware. With typical Microsoft persistence, the current generation of the Pocket PC is very usable, and costs have come down enough to permit the assembly of a reasonably high-powered specification for low cost. Palm finds the market much more challenging than before and has had to drop prices and increase functionality to stay competitive, so we now have more choices than previously.

Many people connect their Palm Pilots to Exchange to download email, contacts, and the calendar. At this point, if you count cell phones, Pocket PCs, pagers, and other smart email-capable devices, users may have too much choice for lightweight stay-in-touch devices and the choice often comes down to familiarity. If you have used a Palm Pilot for years, then you are probably going to continue to use a Palm. After users are hooked by an application or have built up data on a device, relatively few people migrate from one device to another unless they can get better functionality and keep all their data. As long as Palm continues to evolve and stay competitive, it will retain a substantial user base. The danger is that the architecture of the Pocket PC allows for more expansion in a world of .NET applications and Palm may struggle to compete. Time will tell.



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Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrators Pocket Consultant
ISBN: 0735619786
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

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