My old Palm IIIx is no longer collecting dust on the book shelf. It has been given a new set of AAAs and pressed back into service. As I have said on previous incarnations of this page, I kept the IIIx because, in it's heyday, it was the perfect balance of form and function and the PDA to have. After a year and a quarter using an iPaq 3630 Pocket PC as my primary PDA, I have decided to sell it off and go back to a PalmOS PDA. Whilst PPC ownership has been fun and a learning experience, a recent trial return to my trusty Palm IIIx has convinced me that my future lies with with the Palm OS and not Microsoft's. My reasons for heading back are numerous but the main factors are these:
Palm's olive branch - Part of the reason I moved to a PPC in the first place was Palm's shoddy treatment a last year of those running Palm-related websites. Although Happy Palm wasn't one of those affected, the fiasco over hobbyist website URLs with the word 'Palm' in them left a bitter taste in many a mouth, including mine. Today, now Palm has stopped harassing it's fans my swap to PPC, in retrospect, feels more like a knee-jerk reaction than a sound decision.
Office in/compatibility - One key factor in moving to a PPC was the supposed seamless handling of Office documents which, like millions the world over, I use extensively in my work. I have had growing suspicions that Pocket Word and Pocket Excel were lacking some of the refinements of say Wordsmith and DataViz's Documents To Go but not having run them side by side, I wasn't sure. However, when Steven Bush over at Brighthand published his comparison recently, my suspicions were confirmed and more scales fell from my eyes.
Form factor fun(tion) - Although I have my doubts and fears about being tied to proprietary technologies, in this case Memory Stick (tm), there is no ignoring the fact that Sony are producing some of the most innovative, well-featured and good looking PDAs there are to be had at this time. The weight, bulk and clumsiness of the iPaq and its CF sleeve have become an increasing annoyance that I am no longer prepared to ignore. In my opinion, although the PDA I plan to buy, either a Sony Clie T675c or PEG-NR70V, has roughly the same proportions as the unsleeved iPaq, the clamshell form factor of the NR70V particularly exploits this size to better effect and provides greater functionality. My IIIx will meet all my essential PDA needs until I get the new one but I am impressed by the way that these high end Sony Clies stretch the OS to the limit and pack in additional functionality.
...and finally - I missed Graffiti a great deal. Despite devoting a considerable amount of effort to configuring the PPC's Transcriber to recognise my scrawl, I could never get comfortable with it. Coming back to my IIIx again, I was surprised at how natural Graffiti felt to me and how much faster it was than transcribing my own handwriting. I missed the elegant simplicity of the interface. I missed the intuitive commands. I missed the ingenuity of the hacks and those that wrote them. I missed the Palm user community and the special feeling of thumbing one's nose at Bill and his Seattle Posse. Of course, I just know that I'll go and buy this damn Clie only to find that I have a Friday afternoon special with 4 missing pixels, a slack hinge, a loose stylus and ... well, you get my meaning - at least it will give me something to write about on Happy Palm!
Posted by bignoseduglyguy at November 27, 2002 12:00 PM | TrackBack