Handheld Stuff

The handheld war
Soon many competitors will be filling the arena for the number one mobile device. There's Apple's iPhone, Windows new devices with Windows Mobile 6, and of course Palm.

The Apple iPhone was announced at Mac world conference in San Francisco this year. It is sleek black device with a nice intuitive GUI and full internet browsing capabilities. It is completely touch screen. It can also act as an iPod on a separate battery just for music. It is $500 and $600 for four and eight gigabyte capacities. It seems to be a very popular device for professionals and even non-professionals.

Windows Mobile 6 looks to be a very promising update. Although it mainly looks like a long over-due graphical update, it also includes a new view mode in calender and I'm sure there are some new features under the hood as well. Windows devices are becoming much sleeker. Although I feel a lot of us missed outon the incredible palm-top generation of devices, these are incredibly powerful little devices. Unfortunately no longer in production though. The new Motorola Q and Samsung Black Jack. Which are some of the thinnest Windows Smart phone devices. The prospects of stand alone Windows Mobile products are rather dismal, now that Dell has pulled out of the market.

Now Palm has really worked them selves into a rut. They where scheduled to release OS6 in 2004. Unfortunately that never came it's 2007 now and there is
new talk of a possible OS but really who knows? Palm hasn't released any new stand-alone PDA's in the past year, they have released new Treo's, so maybe Palm is just shooting for the PDA-phone market. In any case Palm needs to make some sort of comeback (and their Life Drive was not even an attempt of a comeback) or else Palm computing inc. will die.

It seems to me old reliable companies are trying to transition to the needs of consumers that want a PDA-phone but they forgot about there most loyal users the standalone PDA users. Some companies still have a long way to go with the PDA-phone product. I have yet to see a PDA-phone that does PDA well and Phone well (the Treo is close). Windows Mobile is doing okay in their mobile phone market but with Dell gone there just isn't much hope left for standalone powerful PDA's that used to drive the market. If Apple will allow people to release things like keyboards and such for their iPhone, and if Apple will allow third party development, I can assuredly say that Apples iPhone will take the market by storm.