How I learned to stop worrying and ditch the PDA

[Brad Isaac]

No, that's not me talking, it's r.emory lundberg over at MobileWhack. Lundberg went out and purchased a 4155 thinking that it was a great idea for keeping contacts and appointments all in one location and to play an MP3 or movie here or there. Unfortunately the OS seemed a little bit difficult to deal with, in fact Lundberg was "horrified" by it
Anyway, you might want to check out the rest of the column to see how some people view the Pocket PC line and why there is an uphill battle in gaining acceptance.
"It sure sounded good in theory. Keeping my contacts and appointments on a PDA again just seemed like a logical move. It was a backwards move for me, since I don't really like the idea of carrying multiple gizmos around. But the notion of a small device that was very thin, fit in a pocket or bag with minimal disturbance and had built-in WiFi and Bluetooth sounded pretty cool.
I could use a better email client when I'm on the road, the one in my mobile phone isn't particularly great. I could also check out the wealth of PocketPC applications and read eBooks on a better display. I do read a lot of eBooks, I actually use them every day - I figured out a great way to use ReadM to stuff my prayer-book onto my smartphone and easily find what I was looking for or needed."
Any comments?

[bkbroil]

I disagree....I think the UI is fairly intuitive. There may be more things hidden away that take a little time to figure out...but that's half the fun of having a gadget, isn't it?

[Drum4ever]

Just another uninformed article by a guy whose vcr (yes he uses one of those) still flashes 12:00 and his microwave just heats coffee and pops popcorn. Frankly, I'm tired of verbose techno-wimps being published as having a clue or being qualified to judge a technology that is clearly well beyond them but makes perfect sense to their 3 year olds.

[bluemax]

That's ok. If they are really scared by the nasty little pda, I'll be glad to take it off their hands and keep them safe from it. 8-)

[sracer]

Lundberg does make a few valid points.
Except for the Today screen, the PPC is extremely awkward to use and is poorly designed for mobile use. Only by heavy tweaking and customizing does it come close to being usable. Just consider how many menus/dialogs one must drill down to see a list of running apps in order to close them.
An objective comparison of an out-of-the-box Palm, PPC, and smartphone will shed some light on what's lies in the future for these devices. PPCs' forte is flexibility... not ease-of-use. Palm's is ease of use, but no flexibility. SmartPhones are appliances. PPCs are not. Palms fall somewhere in the middle.
Keep in mind not everyone enjoys babysitting their gadgets. There's something to be said for pick-it-up-and-go. We gain a certain enjoyment over creating our own themes, installing apps, trying out new things, etc. If time-constraints prevented us from doing those things, I wonder just how "enjoyable" it would be to own a PPC.
As my already scarce discretionary free time dwindles down to nothing, I struggle with keeping my PPC and switching back to my Pocket Viewer... or setting up calendar/contacts syncing with my cell phone.
But then I look at another upcoming cross-country trip and then I know for at least THAT trip, I'll need to take my PPC.

[manukno]

I agree with BK. I find PPC's OS intuitive. It has it's quirks, but what OS doesn't. I work in an organization of 180 people. Our IS department was handing our Palm units to anyone who wanted one. After one year of using the Palm OS, we switched to PPC. Our people picked up the PPC OS quicker and with less confusion. The PPC OS is more similar to Windows than Palm's OS, and therefore Windows users can learn PPC easily. The people that I have run into that have problems using a PDA (Palm or PPC) usually are either technically challenged and/or are accustomed to one OS and have difficulty switching to another.