PalmOne have released LifeDrive after much leakage of information. Their site presents a very marketbale device, yet in my opinion, a poorly made demo is delivered. When initially glancing at the details yesterday morning, I was appalled to find a Flash clip that incorporated every possible usability flaw. I could never get what I actually wanted — a large gallery of pictures. (UPDATE: They seemed to have realised it by now and changed)

The 4 GB capacity on this Palm-powered devices is useful for large media files. MP3 files come to mind in particular.

It is not good news all around though. In UseNet, people have raised concerns about bettery life (ironic if you think of the name of the device), weight, and size. Here are a few snippets from comp.sys.palmtops.pilot:

AaronJ: But to get that it seems that you also get a bloated (big and heavy), warm to the touch, $100 more expensive PDA that takes several seconds to load apps. Is this really progress?

Lone Bard: Where am I going to carry this thing? my Man-Purse?

Other things that suck…

• Battery Life
• Heat Issues
• Slow Ass HardDrive
• Mesh on back (can anyone say “dirt collector”?)

AaronJ: I found some battery tests here:

http://www.bargainpda.com/discussion/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8987

Looks like 4+ hours max.

• Some of the earliest reviews to come out: Brighthand

This short publication about the History of PDA‘s presents a nice pictorial collage of devices, from the very early days until the emergence of the Palm Pilot.
 
 

• Also mentioned in PalmAddict

Photo from John C. Dvorak

A slowly-expanding dot may often appear on Treo displays. It is a serious problem, which has become a real plague affecting a whole range of Treo models.

It starts as small patches of yellow that gradually grow and eventually destroy the entire screen.

Other people in UseNet have voiced complaints with regards to the stability of the Treo. It apparently cannot endure weeks or months without a reset, unlike other devices from PalmOne. Nonetheless, the vast majority is praising the Treo, describing it as an excellent PDA which successfully integrates telephony with highly-functional computing.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Services that manage lists of tasks on-line spread rather quickly. Matt Mullenweg recently announced:

Someone cloned all of Ta-da List into Bla-Blah List which uses Flash for the interface instead of HTML/JS.

A diary that is well-integrated with mail accounts and accessible via the Internet
click image to view in full size

I have come across similar features in recent versions of Horde (shown above). I truly believe that these tools can compete with PDA‘s, especially when content is edited in collaboration with a team. All software mentioned, by the way, is completely free.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Palm OS is a wonderful platform, but like all others, it exhibits some irrational behaviour.

• #1: Clipboard too small
  
  Example: have you ever tried to copy a portion of one memo onto another?
   
• #2: No undo stack
  
  Example: erase an entire paragraph, then type in a single letter. Can the paragraph return back to life?
   
• #3: Limit on memo size
  
  Description: a user runs out of memo space and needs to fragment the text.
   
• #4: Low-resolution applications
  
  Description: even with high-resolution screens, scrolling is much needed, for example in Date Book.
   
• #5: No key locking
  
  Example: Palm that powers up in the pocket.
   
• #6: Unquoted limit on number of categories
  
  Example: hard-core Palm users that accumulate too many items under the restrictive number of categories.
   
• #7: Error log dismissed automatically
  
  Description: on the PC-side, error logs disappear after 60 seconds; no option to change that exists.
   
• #8: Repeating events archived just once
  
  Description: those who are fond of archiving will notice that repeating events get archived only once — at the end.
   
• #9: Searching twice within the same item
  
  Example: ever tried finding all occurrences of a term in one single item? Searching is poor in scope. Only a global search is available and it highlights the first occurrence.
   
• #10: No alarm priorities/types
  
  Example: loud alarm in the middle of a meeting or quiet alarm when a crucial event comes up.
   

Cited by: PalmAddict

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is voice-recognition software that’s cutting-edge. It is not yet another speech-to-text application; it is high-performing as it exploits the entire power of a modern Pentium 3 (better or equivalents) machine and it involves a training phase where an individual’s voice is learned.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is now available for the Palm Tungsten. The recorded data will be synchronised with the desktop and then interpreted automatically. This makes a vision come true — the vision of composing E-mail by talking to a PDA. See the Web site for details.

Cited by: PalmAddict

here came a time when I stopped shutting down machines, let alone restarting them. The waiting is unnecessary and re-opening of programs is avoidable. Today’s computer architecture is sophisticated enough to deprive monitors from power and stop the rotation of hard-drives after a specified time-out. What’s more, modern programming languages, standards and fast-growing operating systems make memory leaks rare, while in fact, perhaps needless to mention, memory becomes cheaper.

My personal experience has shown that Windows XP is stable, but it slows down considerably after hours of work. Similarly, the Registry gets bloated after months of regular use. Linux (and branches like Mac OS X) suffers from none of these issues. I typically reboot after 50-100 hours of persistent work. Windows CE suffers from similar problems and needs to be reset quite often (provided it has not already crashed). My Palm gets reboot every 3 weeks or so.

The bottom line: if you tolerate system crashes or reboot too often, consider alternative platforms.