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MARK NEEDHAM

Palm OS to Pocket PC Mark Needham shares his personal experiences of the changing face of the PDA p until last year, the differences between Palm- and Pocket PC-based PDAs were clear enough. Palms prioritised size, battery life and price at the expense of function – they were smaller, cheaper and went at least a week without recharging. Despite a huge downloadable software base, most Palms got used solely as an electronic address and appointment book, appealing to folk who wanted an electronic Filofax that wouldn’t let them down. Microsoft instead went for greater function and charged more for the privilege: Pocket PCs offered all the functions of Palms, plus cut-down word processing, spreadsheet, email, Windows Media Player for sound and video, and eBook reading (which Bill Gates once hoped we’d all be doing on the train).

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When Palm produced colour models, its screens were modest, taking care not to consume too much power. Pocket PC encouraged support for the stunning colour screens of the iPAQ range, which looked good but ate battery life. The downside was that Pocket PCs were large, ran for no longer than the average laptop without mains power and, in true Microsoft tradition, crashed from time to time for no apparent reason. In short, Pocket PCs appealed more to people who wanted a computing platform that fitted into the corporate Microsoft infrastructure, but needed constant maintenance attention from the IT department. But these differences are narrowing. The iPAQ 1940 and 2210 machines are both smaller and cheaper than the traditional Pocket PC bricks, leading one PC magazine to announce that price difference between the two platforms has almost disappeared as a differentiating factor. Meanwhile, Palm has been adding bells and whistles to its basic package, sometimes at the expense of battery life. PC Pro’s

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PDA supertest (see issue 110, p129) commented that ‘Palm OS is no longer without audio and its wireless connectivity rivals Pocket PC… it arguably even has the edge over Microsoft’s baby OS’. What haven’t changed are the fundamentals of the user interfaces. Just as with Mac versus Windows, users of each platform

seem to prefer the format they first learnt, a phenomenon cynics call ‘baby duck syndrome’ (the first animal you see becomes imprinted as mother). A reviewer on ZDNet recently stuck his neck out to list ‘simpler to use’ as one of Palm OS’s advantages, but the PC Pro supertest tactfully commented that ‘both PPC and Palm OS are easy to pick up.’ Originally a Psion user, for most of the past three years I’ve been using the sturdy and reliable Palm m515 to carry my contacts, diary, some documents and email. However, over the past few months, I’ve moved, first to a Fujitsu Siemens LOOX and then to an iPAQ H5450. The superiority of Pocket PC’s ActiveSync over Palm OS’s HotSync struck me immediately, but the trade-off seems to have been diminished reliability, particularly irritating in a machine that you need to work at all times. Nobody ever moves to Windows for love, and like many others I changed to Pocket PC because I had a need I thought Microsoft’s products would meet – I keep a lot of emails in my inbox, more than

was ever practical on the Palm. Although the m515 won’t synchronise on its own with Outlook emails (or Word or Excel documents), DataViz’s Documents to Go makes a good job of closing this gap, but its email client is slow. The time came when I missed a train because my m515 took more than 25 minutes to synchronise with my Outlook inbox. Pocket PC did meet those needs, but in so doing it also revealed many shortcomings. POORLY MADE PDA The Fujitsu Siemens LOOX is a particularly poorly made Pocket PC, which is why I ended up with it. We took a business decision to sell the LOOX solely for the purpose of running TomTom Navigator. It was much cheaper than the HP iPAQ range and had a CompactFlash slot built in, which was useful for the maps Navigator needs. However, the returns rate was so high, we discontinued it and ended up with several units that customers had returned but the manufacturer wouldn’t take back: I adopted one of these. Despite its limited aesthetic appeal, the LOOX immediately demonstrated the superiority of Pocket PC’s synchronisation with Outlook. There’s no need to press a button to synchronise Pocket PC and Windows, as the ActiveSync process is looking for changes all the time. If a new mail comes in when you have Pocket PC connected, you’ll see it appear on the handheld and can read and then delete it without disturbing what you’re doing on your main PC. If you change an appointment in Outlook, you can watch it change on the handheld in front of your eyes.And there’s no danger of missing a train while waiting for a synchronisation to finish, as each incremental change is made as you go. However, after more than a year of never having to reset my Palm, I soon had to find the reset button on the LOOX. I also learnt to live in dread of the low-battery warning – when

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the battery gets low, Pocket PC doesn’t conserve power on a backup battery, but tends to lose all of its charge and dump all your data, which is particularly irritating for satellite navigation users. Another journalist told me of the time he’d loaded all the maps of Germany onto his iPAQ on a Friday in preparation for a journey to Hanover the next week. He left the machine in the boot of his car over the weekend and during the drive to Germany. By the time he tried to turn the machine on to guide him to his hotel, the battery had gone flat, losing all the map data he needed. A car, mains or USB charger is a vital accessory for any Pocket PC owner. I’ve now dumped the Loox in favour of an iPAQ H5450, complete with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, although each of these functions just increases the rate at which the battery is used up. Although it does have a separate backup battery and hasn’t yet lost my data, I always need to take a USB sync charger with me if I’m going away from the office for more than a couple of days. BUYING SECOND-HAND? I sold my m515 for under £75 to a buyer who was, by his own admission, only looking for an electronic address list and calendar. While I’ve been testing Pocket PC, he’s been very happy with his purchase. If this is all you’re looking for in a handheld,

Pocket PC users watch the batterylevel screen with trepidation.

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you can find a number of secondhand m515s for sale on eBay at very reasonable prices. The m515’s memory is limited to 16MB and, although it has an SD slot, this isn’t as much use as it ought to be, because half of the programs you might want to store data on and

ProTone turns a Pocket PC into a digital recorder.

run from SD card insist on hogging the main memory instead. The metallic hard case you can buy to go with the m515 makes it even more roadworthy and looks good at the same time. Once I took it to California for ten days without a mains charger and, although I had to be careful how much I used it, it worked for the entire time I was there. Many of the accessories for the Tungsten are compatible with those for the m515, so when you want an additional charger or cable there’s a good chance it will still be available. Above all, the m515, like most of Palm’s range, is robust enough to last for a fourth or further year of use, by which time I suspect that most LOOXs would be landfill. POCKET PC SOUND RECORDING While Pocket PC comes with a media player built in, you have to buy additional software to turn your machine into a digital tape recorder. You can then play back recordings of interviews, lectures or brutally inflict the musical genius of your children on your colleagues at work. ProTone (www.poccosoftware.com)

costs $25 (£14.50) and claims to record sound with a minimum of tapping, selecting, configuring and adjusting. The original Psion 5mx came with this function built in, but at the time that was being sold even just a few minutes of talk filled up the largest memory card then available. Nowadays, memory cards are much larger and compression is a lot better. It’s claimed that ProTone’s compression algo- Find out what wireless technology has in rithm will save 20 hours of store for our bodies and environment. speech on a typical SD card. the way portable electronics act I found ProTone easy to use almost as an extension of the and fun to play with, but the human body, which leads to some microphone on the H5450 just interesting insights: isn’t sensitive enough to record ‘There’s a growing need for conversational speech successnetwork linkages among the fully. If you’re old enough to electronic devices distributed remember hearing the Watergate around and within the body. It tapes on radio or TV, you might may make practical sense, for remember how strange it seemed example, to centralise power that Nixon was brought down by supply instead of equipping each recordings that seemed to be all device with its own batteries snap, crackle and pop. He wouldn’t or generators… This then have improved the quality of his introduces the need to drape the recordings by using an iPAQ… body with power cords or – ME++ perhaps more elegantly – to If you’ve ever felt that by putting weave power distribution circuitry on a headset to your phone or PDA (maybe composed of conductive you’re plugging yourself into a polymers) into clothing.’ global network, you might be I listened to a lucid and interested to read ME++, a new concise lecture on the architecbook by architect and MIT lecturer tural implications of technology, William J Mitchell. which the author recently gave in Subtitled ‘The Cyborg Self and London. In the book, however, he the Networked City’, it’s about never uses words of one syllable how changes in wireless technowhen he can talk about logy will change our cities and our electronomadic spatial practices bodies. Just as the evolution of or asynchronous agoras. As a the car allowed Los Angeles to consequence, the book is much evolve over a sprawling freeway less concise and less disciplined network, Mitchell believes that the than his lectures. increased availability of portable ● MARK NEEDHAM computing and telephones will once again change the way cities Mark Needham is managing are built. Out will go bank director of Widget UK Ltd, a branches and telephone boxes, distributor of mobile and in will come coffee bars with computing accessories. Wi-Fi networks where students Please send comments to and jobseekers can while away [email protected] the hours. Mitchell is also interested in

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