O’Reilly Networks publisher Dale Dougherty has a long review of the iPAQ — Compaq’s PocketPC handheld that is getting rave reviews across the board and is, as a result, in short supply. Dougherty loves the color screen and the ability to do a lot of things with the iPAQ that simply cannot be done at the moment (at least easily or without spending a lot of money) with the Palm.
More importantly, Dougherty wonders if the central idea that made the Palm a hit is getting a bit worn at the edges today:
The insight behind the Palm was to do a lot less: just focus on being a PIM. However, much has happened since the Newton and even the Palm were first introduced. While the PC has remained the same, we have seen a proliferation of small devices, including PDAs, but also cell phones, pagers, digital cameras, MP3 players, digital voice recorders, Gameboys, and specialty reading devices such as the Rocketbook. There seems to be an opportunity — a new niche — to begin combining some of these functions in a single device.
Well said. One of the devices I am really interested in are the e-book readers, and I’m going to have to resist the temptation to buy Franklin’s E-Bookman when it comes out. I use a lot of book-length reference materials that are usually in PDF or HTML form that I’d like to carry on a handheld. I cannot imagine reading a novel on something like the Rocketbook or E-Bookman, but I can see stuffing a 1,000 page reference manual in there rather than having to tote my laptop or, even worse, a physical copy of the book.
And Dougherty is right that the Palm has not kept up. The screen on my Palm IIIx is good enough for reading short articles from AvantGo while I am stuck in line at the bank, but is simply not suitable for more serious reading tasks. On the other hand, buying an iPAQ is probably investing in dead technology since although the iPAQ may be a great machine, the PocketPC platform as a whole seems to be just as dead in the water as Windows CE was (ironically one of the barriers here is that several of the applications I rely on with my Palm do not have Windows CE/Pocket PC versions).
When I needed a lot of different materials at hand during a meeting or speech I used to carry around these large 3″ ring binders. Now I typically take my laptop. It would be nice to shrink that further and put it all in the same handheld where I have my schedule, pictures of my daughter, and a computer chess program, but it looks like I’m still going to have to wait awhile longer for a good all-purpose handheld.