Personal Digital Adventure - Part 3

2003-09-19 14:02:31

By 2002, almost two years after I acquired my Palm Vx, there were a lot of new models and manufacturers in the market. Colour models abounded from Palm, Sony, Handspring, Toshiba, HP and other manufacturers. PalmOS based models continued to rule the market with unassailable market shares, vindicating my stand that there are things that make a PDA usable, simplicity being one of them.

Ramming an entire Windows or Linux desktop into a small form factor doesn't improve the user experience in any way. PalmOS was designed to deal with issues that were never on anyone's radar when designing a desktop operating system.

Innovation

Not that this would try and stop people from trying to "convert" me to something else. The number of debates I have had with friends about their perceptions of a good PDA operating system is literally uncountable.

Amazingly enough, while many people would argue that it made more sense to have a Windows based PDA instead of a "non-standard" OS like PalmOS, the bitter irony was that none of these debaters ever acquired a PDA of their own. The only ones who came close to making a winning argument for a switch all used PalmOS based units themselves. ;-)

In any case, I have always been someone who believed in choice and trying out new things (I use Linux by choice on my desktops and notebooks), and having used a PDA for so long, I greatly appreciated the simplicity that PalmOS and applications built on it offered me, so there was little chance of my throwing away all that experience for something else.

Alternatives

I did spend a lot of time examining the alternatives. I played with various different PDAs, running different operating systems. I found that while most PDAs had now grown to the provide the kind of flexibility that PalmOS based units offered, the actual availability of choices was limited when it came to software. In most cases, I found that Windows CE (or PocketPC) based units tended to try and replicate the functionality of a standard Digital Diary, with a few desktop applications thrown in. Sure, you could now get units that could play MP3 files, or even show video clips, but that was about it when it came to innovation.

The real innovation (from my perspective) was happening on my own familiar home ground - under PalmOS.

With the advent of Sony in the PDA market, things had begun changing rapidly for the PalmOS world. Sony produced consumer-grade PDAs running PalmOS with features not seen in any other PDA before them, such as cameras, MP3 players, virtual writing areas (instead of the dedicated and space hogging Graffiti area), higher resolutions, better colours and great pricing.
Palm was falling behind, and their offerings throughout 2002 were meagre compared to what Sony was offering.

Phase III

This was the state of affairs in February 2003 when I found myself on a lookout for a new PDA. Nothing really attracted me, other than the latest Sony models.
However, I wasn't too keen on changing brands (albeit with the same software platform) - I had grown into the PDA world with Palm models, and along with the usability factor, the brand loyalty was a big factor as well.
End March 2003, my Palm Vx finally died, and I found myself frantically SMSing my friend Prasanto Kumar Roy (PKR), who was about to go for a short trip to the USA, to pick up something for me.

"Sure", he said. "What?"

PKR is himself a Palm Vx user for almost as long as I have been, and understood the issues involved. He was quite possibly the best person to take a call on this for me, and letting him take an autonomous choice in the matter on my behalf was probably the safest bet I could lay down.

At which point Palm went and dramatically changed the stakes.

(Continued in Part 4)

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