[Gerard]

Man oh man, I am SOOOOOO glad of all the time spent researching the Palm vs. PPC question back in the winter of 2000. My initial impulse was to get a Palm, as clients had said they were reliable and lon-lasting per battery charge. Seems those things Palm was best at are no longer very relevant, with battery times being roughly similar now, and reliability getting shakier the closer Palm versatility gets to what PPCs have done all along. I was like this close - || - to getting one back in April 2000... and would no doubt have continued down that path after the first device.

Luckily a local magazine store brought in the first issue of Pocket PC Magazine that month, about a week before I was ready to drop some cash, and Casio's blurb in that issue just blew me away. Palm is going the way of all once-great technologies.

When I tried a friend's Palm for map navigation in California back in 1995 or so, I was duly impressed. Brilliant, simple, with only the Graffiti nonsense alphabet making me annoyed. Now they've finally relented and put in a natural letter recognition input method... I guess partly for legal reasons owing to that patent thing, but no doubt also because 'the user didn't need it before, but the user needs it now'? How clever. It's been noted again and again in the PPC community that Palm's PR is thin, that they spend a lot of energy (and vitriol against Microsoft) justifying their shortcomings as being tied to user needs. It's weak, and they should just admit it.

But of course they cannot, as that would just mean a faster death. So what we'll see instead is a sloooooow fading away, with little blurbs now and then about hotfixes or flashy new hardware. Meanwhile, the high-end Pocket PCs continue to take large leaps towards full desktop functionality and power. Bye Palm. Been nice not knowing you.