Rabbit’s hole

Are Pocket PCs worth it ?

After almost 2 years of being a pocket (and handheld) pc enthusiast, I have decided to take my business elsewhere.

My first PPC was a Jornada 565 from hp that served me very well over the years. I upgraded it to a Jornada 710 (the business class) an year ago and played a little on the side with a Nec MobilePro 770. Just for the heck of it, I also acquired a Jornada 360 (a pattern seems to emerge, doesn’t it ?), a 320, an old Compaq and a few others.

Last months I have been contemplating getting a new one (it was either a hp 4700 or a dell x51v). I’ve read reviews, played around with them in stores, looked at photos and so on. And yet, each time I had almost decided, the same faults annoyed me - faults created by the device class itself, not by a company.

The limited screen size was one of the first ones - from the start it limits the usability. Movies are annoying to watch, reading books makes you squint (or read about 8 words per page) while touch input is laughable.

Weird interaction was another problem : even with the 710 Jornada and it’s keyboard I couldn’t really touch type, while the stylus for a clamshell fells strange. A PPC works a lot better with the stylus but is almost always a data consumer type of device.

Battery life (a point many have complained about) was also a sour spot for me (sometimes I ended up using a 2 AA batteries 40 Mhz processor powered Ericsson MC16 because of it’s 5 days life). I would sacrifice some stamina for power, but modern PPC still do not cover everything a road user might need.

These are the points everybody knows (and hates) but here a few more personal ones : different set of instructions for processors means binaries have to be recompiled in order to function properly - and PPC’s aren’t really developper oriented. You cannot for example write the code, execute and debug it on the same device - you’ll have to write it on a desktop, link it, copy it and then use it (or try to debug it in a simulator). Desktop full compatibility has gotten very important to me (none of that synchronizing crap warms my heart anymore). After all, I’d like to become proficient with a few tools and exapand from there, not learn a different set for each device.

The software is many times not properly tested or has annoying glitches - for example I’ve spent almost half a day installing the PPC RSS Reader egress and still it functioned like hell - images were not opened correctly, after a few syncs it lost the entire list of feeds and from time to time I had to reset it. Unfortunetly, it was one the the best I found out there, so I gave up on the idea after a lost Saturday.

Space is another problem - even if memory cards are getting cheaper and bigger by the minute, they still cost a hell of a lot more than a 200 gigs harddrive (4 GB CF anyone ?). So no way to cram in your favorite music collection, a few movies and some pdf books.

To sum it up, I finally realised a PPC is not exactly what I have been looking for. The size atracted me, but this factor imposed a lot of the limitations I described.

What is my minimal perfect product ? A convertible tablet pc that weighs less than 1.5 kg, with a 14″ or 15″ screen, 5 - 6 hours battery life and enough power to run Winamp and Photoshop at the same time. Why not the new UMPC or Origami ? Because the input still sucks, size is still too small (I’d rather carry half a kilo more and gain 2 hours of battery life and 5 - 6 inches) and the operating system does not guarantee you’ll be using the same software on and off your desktop.

Maybe Santa will hear ?