07-26-2004, 05:43 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 279
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Have I said 'goodbye' to my last Pocket PC?
It's possible. Ever since I saw my first HPC in 2000, I've been looking for the One Thing That Does Everything, and I thought I could have it in the form of a Pocket PC. There were times when I was totally dependent on the little thing--news, Bible, PDF, music, PIM, games, books, etc. and so on. But now, after I've returned a defective iPaq 1940, I'm no longer excited by PPCs--not even VGA PPCs.
Maybe just the end of a phase. But I do have some serious complaints about PPCs that ultimately led me to look towards other things for my techno-fix:
- Software development is slow, and games are meager. I've defended the PPC as a gaming platform before, but now I think that development is just too slow. One reason I was excited was that lots of people were proclaiming "playable" SNES gaming speeds on 400MHz X-Scales and even the iPaq 1940. Well, I learned the hard way that, well, sometimes people get excited about nothing when they're lost in W?BIC! land. The iPaq 1940 sucks for SNES. It's nowhere even close to a satisfying experience. Nothing plays at the right speed, sound must be throttled until it sounds like static. Sure, it's better than PPC2k2. Big deal! Now maybe the Axim X30 can plays SNES games perfectly; maybe it can't. But then there's native games. The market is terrible! Most of the RPGs are D&D, which I really despise. There are a very small handful of companies making quality games at top-notch prices, and in the end none of these approach the immersion or engrossing quality of the GBA.
Then there's other software. I'm tired of SoftMaker and the fact that they haven't updated their TextMaker past 2002 yet; table functionality is still broken. I'm tired of the fact that, at any given time, half of my PPC apps are only there to make my PPC acceptably usable. I'm tired of Adobe Acrobat Reader for PPC's glitchy reflow functionality and I'm too cheap to buy the alternative reader.
- Flash-based memory is becomming obsolete in the face of micro-hard drives. I read a USA Today artice that said that PDAs are being replaced, not only by cell phones, but by MP3 jukeboxes. In fact, it looks a lot like PDAs are getting eaten alive by other machines that do the job several times more satisfyingly. PPCs are do-alls, but their hardware is developing too slow, even to compete with multiple-gadget solutions. Suddenly, convergence is a lot less romantic.
Maybe more later. I have to go.
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iPAQ h3635 => Jornada 548 => Jornada 720 => Jornada 568 => iPAQ h1935 => iPAQ h1940 => Axim x50v
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