Re: [NTLK] [OT] Newton, PocketPC & Palm

From: Christian Armbruster (carmbruster_at_mac.com)
Date: Mon May 10 2004 - 02:54:14 PDT


I had a huge number of PDAs (about 12 !) in the recent years : Palms,
Clies, iPaqs, Communicators, Psions etc. and none of them beats, what
the Newton (2100 here) does for me. For me the next best are the Psion
PDAs, because they can nearly do anything You want, without the need
for a Computer, which 'hosts' them. Recently my old iMac died and I was
extremly glad, that there was my Newton with an IrDA HP 340 on my Desk,
allowing me to just work on. My brand new Clie was rendered useless...

Yes, have a new TH55 Sony Clie here and yes its great - it has
blueetooth and WIFI, a colour screen and plays MP3s in stereo out of
the box, but I can't work with it, due to the small screen and the not
integrated applications.

An example : I am a teacher, and I would like to make a lesson plan for
next week. On the Newton I set up the dates in More Info and link every
lesson to a Notepad in which I store what I want o do in this lesson.
In Addition I also link one lesson to the adress of the local fire
department, because I have to call them in order to get a sight seeing
tour with the 4th graders. When I now look at More Infos view for the
next week I see all my lessons and with just a tap I can switch to the
linked notepads or adresses ( or word docs, or ... etc.)

On the Palm: I can enter all the the stuff as well and yes there are
'powerd up' agendas like Datebook 5, BUT there is no integration
between the applications. I will have to do a lot of tap and click to
sample all the information I want. And then there is the annoying small
screen. I really don't understand why the "smaller is better" concept
works that well. When it comes to books, nobody would buy the new book
by Tom Clancy in a Palm Tungsten T format. Its just comfortable to have
a big screen, a true pen ( not a toothpick) and to use ones real
writing.

I teach German and I consider Graffiti to be a true killer for nice
writing, and a real hard job for ones brain, because it has to 'switch'
between writing on paper and writing on your Palm PDA - belive me its
really annoying when you write on the Palm and then switch to piece of
paper and by mistake write a Graffiti character - it looks terrible !

In the end its very personal thing and therefore those are Personal
Digital Assistants. For me the Newton is great, for somebody else a
small PDA for quick information lookup would be better and a third will
need MP3s for his job to be done. There is no "good" or "bad" or
"evil".

cheers
Christian

> In the interest of becoming a more well-rounded person :^) ..how
> exactly is Palm evil, in peoples opinions? Are PocketPCs also evil? Is
> anyone out there using a Portfolio?

-- 
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon May 10 2004 - 03:30:01 PDT