Just another computer industry non-news event.
I gave my Palm away.
I carry a Pocket PC on occasion to either have the local movie times handy or to make notes when I sit in the bookstore. Hmm...well sometimes I browse the hundreds of web pages I download into it when I am stuck in the very unliterary lounge of my doctor's office.
My daughter likes me to carry it so that she can play Dig Dug on it.

I am nuts about my $50 Target discount bin Visor. It replaces a planner that was big enought to choke a mule, notifys my when I have meetings, e-books etc.

I do not like carrying it, a cell phone, and a digitial camera though. They need to converge. Or I need a purse.

Any skinny on what the merged companies will change thier name too?

I use my Palm a lot. Brainforest outliner lets me write anywhere. Several databases for shop floor production and QA. Shopping lists - not trivial - I get to a major city once a month

Handspring had a slot that might have actually worked. These things would make perfect factory process monitoring devices.

I use my palm for ebooks and odd appointment reminders. But I just sold it when it quit syncing via serial/usb with my OS X machine. I don't miss it much, but wish my cell phone were smarter.

And this is apropos to what?

Whatever these guys did, it ain't working no more. Palm, Handspring, shmamspring.

Dvorak is right, they can't figure out how to market these things. And I'm not talking about promoting these things. I'm talking price. For $500 bucks, you can get a friggin' used laptop with WiFi. C'mon. Who needs a glorified cellphone with MS-apps? Or a glorified phone book for making calls?

On the low end, do I need to spend $100 on a phone book in addition to my cellphone, which holds all the contact info I need?

They tried it all: PDA as jewelry (the Claudia), PDA as super-Gameboy (first Handsprings), PDA as "micro-computer" (iPAQ) and PDA as phone (Treo). Wheeeeeeeeeee.

I have a Palm and it's more of a glorified phone book than anything. Actually, it's just the heaviest object in my compact and light work bag since I haven't bothered to replace the battery in months. Once my cellphone is easy to sync (and it should be as soon as the software catches up), I think I'll just throw the Palm away. Or use it as a paperweight.

it might be worth noting that handspring doesn't have any actual manufacturing operations -- they really just come up with the concept (design/marketing) and farm the actual construction out elsewhere.

Are people still buying PDAs? In my "inner circle" of maybe 100 friends and cow-orkers, there's been 1 PDA purchase in the last year.

I dead-ended with the TRGpro. It was purchased specifically to be upgradable (particularly to Bluetooth, which it will never support), but with the new connection standard that Palm moved to a while back, no new PalmOS-supported accessories have come out for it in years. Not that it matters, since I have only bunged batteries in it for a couple of days in the last year.

And the Palms are typically used for much longer before being left to rot in a drawer than the WinCE PDAs.

Edited by author 06-04-2003 04:44 PM
Donald:

I doubt that Apple would touch the current Palm corporate
set-up with a ten-foot pole (judging from the most recent
pronouncements from Steve Jobs).


tom
-=W=-

All the easier for Apple to buy?