[Gerard]

I'd not place myself in the true believer camp, quite the opposite really. I've plenty of beefs with Microsoft, foremost with the nightmare that is my old PC, but with various versions of the PPC OS as well. Glitchy reminder databases and reliability are right up there around the top of the rants list. But I have enjoyed all the many things which have worked, in spite of all the wasted time fighting the things which haven't in the past 5 years.

I have been trying to stick to the thread subject, which seems to be about whether or not Palm is coming around to doing things 'right' whatever that might mean. The failure to get the more than a year old new OS into even one marketed device and the ridiculously power-consumptive microdrive implementation of the Life Drive are just a couple of the major pointers to the con argument - though perhaps they're patching the drive buffer behavior?

Anyway, in terms of Palm doing things more efficiently, as Jeff keeps stating... seems I must harken back to another users recent comment in this thread. That person (I forget whom) said that they'd recently found the Treo to skip very little when playing music in the background. Hm. I've got GSPlayer, nPOPw, File Explorer, 3 Pocket IE windows, and all my background junk running on this glitchy old Dell X5. There's a serious audio driver bug in Dell's rendition of WM2003 for this device, and Dell's patch just makes it worse so I don't use that. It makes for difficulty adjusting volume, with sharp static unless I adjust up and down a couple or a few times to get it to stop. GSPlayer lets me accomplish that in a second or two. Very device/OS-specific problem, and not my point. But I'm playing tunes as I type into this page, which just loaded while I was listening. I have not heard any pauses or glitches since starting to listen to this Be Good Tanya's album 15 minutes ago. My Belkin keyboard driver is active, GigaBar is running, my Symbol Wi-Fi CF card's two programs are running, so are FontOnStorage, gsGetFile.dll, SystemPath, SuperAlertSE... and probably a thing or two I'm forgetting. Oh yeah, and cLaunch and WeatherPanel on the Today screen. I just opened File Explorer, switched to sort by type (the slowest, most RAM-intensive sort operation of any file manager app I know), and tapped the Windows folder. Took about 10 seconds to gradually load the folder full of junk, but nope, not a trace of interruption in the sweet singing of 'Lonesome Blues'.

Let's see, what could I do to try and make the music skip? How about I load Pocket Artist. That's got to do it! Ah, there's a quarter-second pause, at last. So my PPC is 'human' after all, just like a Treo 650....... only, it's probably doing several times as much work keeping all that stuff running than the Palmish Treo was for the test, right?

So really, how well does Palm multi-task? I'm genuinely, un-sarcastically curious Jeff and others. Could you humour me a little, get a few apps running at once, things which the developers have tailored to multi-thread/multi-task so they're really running all at the same time? Then launch an MP3 file and switch back to a browser and start entering data into a dialogue such as this, see how it runs. If smoothly without interruptions, great, I'd love to know about it.
You see, my little brother is still holding off buying a PDA until he feels fully comfortable with a decision. Taking his sweet time about it. He's a film director/animator, top level sort with a sports car and fancy house and all that crap, but is making do with a phone for now because he wants a really killer PDA that'll do most everything and not be obsolete for at least a year or two. He's had a Palm a few years ago, but it died, cost him all his information. He'd consider a Palm again if I could assure him it'd be great. Frankly I don't know what to say. For his needs, something like the Asus P505 would probably be nice, or maybe a Treo, though he's heard from underlings using them that they're not so hot. A Life Drive won't do, as it has to be a phone too. He's likin' the Jam, but mostly for the iPod aesthetic. What say you; could he get everything phone and PDA-wise out of a Treo or something else Palmish and still listen to tunes, or not? Money is irrelevant. Massive performance and reliability are everything to him. He's got state-of-the-art PC and Mac notebooks with all the bells and whistles, and is comfortable with Unix mainframes, so OS is also irrelevant. If Apple put out a phone/PDA tomorrow he'd probably just buy that. Seems relevant, maybe helping to bring some focus to this subject - any takers?