Well, its back to the light of day for me and after reading my diatribe on Palms last night, I have to say that I’ve given the impression that there’s nothing wrong with the PocketPC platform. To this, I have to say “Far from it”.
Microsoft has always believed in adept use (or should I say reliance) on Moore’s law to support its operating systems and this is especially true on the PDA front. It’s pretty much a given now, that hardware increases its speed (I would venture the word improves) at a much faster rate than software can. Therefore a normal programmer need not worry about highly optimizing their code – they can simply count on the hardware companies to increase the processor speed to compensate for any problems. Have you ever wondered why the PPCs regularly came with high MHz chips? I can guarantee you that it was not just for playing videos. In fact – here’s an interesting experiment. Go to a computer store and pick out the Tungsten E and the iPAQ 194x. Try use the PIM apps repeatedly in either one and notice the difference. Not only that, notice the resolution difference between the two. Although the 194x has a longer screen and truetype fonts, pictures are much grainier on the PPCs.
Also, in retrospect I think in my haste to lambast Palm, I’ve forgotten to say that yes, they’ve done somethings very right. For example – the find function. On a Palm one simply has to do a global find and you’ll be able to find all the matches in _every one_ of the applications installed on your Palm. Trust me – this thing is damn convenient. Contrast this to the PPC where one often has to use multiple find functions to search all available apps. There are quite a few little details like this on the Palm that we (as users) ignore but which improve our lives. But I’m lambasting you because I care ;)
Ah well, no time to write – indeed – I’ve got to go to Waterloo today.