Third time lucky?
Published: 20 Apr 2000 16:12 BST
It started out copying Windows, and the Psion Series 5; and the result was a disaster. Then it tried putting the same Windows idiom onto an imitation Palm Pilot, and the result was little better. But now, it has come in with something that really does try to do what the Palm did well, and I think that at last, it is worth taking the Pocket PC seriously. Well, it will be, whenever the machines actually show up -- but they are delayed in Europe.
Yesterday, (Wednesday 19th) in London, we saw the launch of three main-stream brands of Pocket PC -- Casio, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq. There were also hints of other versions -- one from Symbol (rugged, wireless based) and one from Asci in Taiwan -- cheaper. And for the first time, I've seen a Microsoft personal digital assistant that I would not want to throw away if you gave it to me as a gift.
That's not to say that I'd throw my Handspring Visor away for one of these -- indeed, I wouldn't. But as Craig Peacock will explain when he launches his pocket PC Help site on Monday 24th "now is the time to take Microsoft's designs seriously."
What the standard PalmOS machines from Palm Computing and Handspring do best, they still do superlatively well. They're cheaper, better engineered, better designed, and most significantly, they still have software on their side. And the battery life battle is a massacre; none of the Microsoft designs can match the Palm OS machines. So my vote still goes to Palm OS.
But it's no longer a complete "no-brain-needed" decision. You'll have a few pros and cons to weigh up.
Two features which stand out on the new Microsoft designs are the ClearType font technology, and the new handwriting recognition software. And besides that, there is the advantage of Pocket Excel, a spreadsheet; and finally, a Web browser which allows you to take your Web sites off your PC and download them onto the toy in your pocket.
As far as how good these features actually are, you're going to have to wait before you know, because none of the products are available yet. There were a few samples at the launch, shared between a couple of hundred press delegates, firmly nailed to the demonstration benches and guarded by their vendors with Rottweiler ferocity.
We saw a demonstration of Pocket Excel in the presentations; but the hands-on demo area seemed to have machines without this software. Is it any good? I can't tell you. And there was one design -- the Compaq iPaq -- which had some clever wrap-around hardware to enhance the basic PDA with other features... will it fit in your pocket? I can't say. Not until some review samples show up in magazine offices and in retail stores will people be able to judge. And the same goes for the handwriting recognition software; the vendors say it is wonderful, but they would, and I haven't been able to test it myself.
The Cleartype font technology does make a real difference. Letters that are really very small indeed, remain surprisingly legible even in poor light. Against that, the widespread use of colour displays meant that it was all backlit most of the time, giving awful battery life.
So: what's actually on the market?
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