You can read my first post in the PDA marketshare thread to see how I feel:
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/foru...ic.php?p=35676
I have to agree with the general antipathy towards Tungsten. It is a nice, solid little device (I placed an order for one yesterday) but it is grossly over-priced for what it offers. 16mb of RAM is outrageously ineffective for "multimedia device". What's worse, because the Tungsten has no built-in media software, it's high-end features can't be tested
before making a purchase. Consumers are expected to buy this product on blind faith, much like a blind date. Just hope and pray the audio quality is good, or the volume is loud enough. We'll find out x months from now when (or if) Real gets around to releasing a media player. And even then, there may be a more to this story...I'm betting this will be some sort of mandatory subscription service..adding more cost to the device.
IMO, low-priced Pocket PCs are going to have a significant impact on PalmOS marketshare at the high-end segment. Consumers are going to see many nice $199-$299 PPCs sporting rich color displays and innovative features for 1/3 the price of Palm and Sony offerings? So what value will consumers get for that decidedly more expensive hardware? Elegance? Well, that's not something users generally pay more for. And frankly I wonder how strong the "more available software" argument will be when there are many applications that don't work under OS5, and a sizable number that do behave rather flaky. But PPC still has a way to go as well (no repeating alarms?) before it can really "replace" PalmOS.
Still, I would be extremely surprised to see an all out reversal of the PDA market, with Microsoft taking the lead. PalmOS will still continue to lead for some time, but I expect MS will close the gap my a narrower margin.
This is going to be very interesting to watch....like a slow train-wreck in progress.