John Cholewa
Member
Registered: Dec 2000
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Posts: 43 |
> Revolutionary? What is revolutionary? Let's face it springboard is
> revolutionary,
I'll agree to that.
> the 16MB in the Pro is 'revolutionary', being the first palmOS to have it.
Nah, that's evolutionary. A relatively small change that you could already implement manually in earlier models. I met somebody months ago who had a Visor with 16MB DRAM.
> Handera's large screen is revolutionary. But all the other stuff is pure evolution.
> Sony's clies are nothing new, bar the memory stick - with no
> applications. Palm hasn't done anything revolutionary yet.
Sony's 710C allows you to directly access the memory stick media (as if it were a USB drive) from the PC while the Clie is in its cradle. That's pretty darn amazing!
> So what revolutionary stuff would you want Handspring to deliver? It
> needs to stick to the Springboard, as so much is being developed for
> it. It needs to stick to PalmOS. We all love to see a Handera size
> screen but then in colour that would drain two AAA bateries in not
> less than a month...
That's nonsense. It isn't colour that kills the battery life. It's the active matrix screen. The Clie and m505 have very good battery life despite their colour capability. This is because they have passive matrix screens and aren't expelling photons at the massive pace seen on the Palm IIIc and the Visor Prism.
There's a tradeoff, of course. Active Matrix (as implemented in these PDAs)looks great in dark areas but is nearly impossible to view in daylight. Passive Matrix looks best in daylight (and uses very little power in daylight) and can be seen in the dark through use of a front-lighting capability as is found on the colour Clies.
As mentioned by somebody else here, the Clie has a 320x320 passive matrix screen with a front light. When the front light is active, I believe that it uses less power than the active matrix screen on the Prism set to minimum brightness. When the front light is off, it's like using a regular Palm, almost. Despite the superior quality of active matrix colour, I believe that passive matrix colour is a superior route to take.
Additionally, Handera's virtual graffiti area and collapsible silkscreen are really growing on me as innovative ideas. After seeing QuickSheet and PalmDocs on a Handera (well, in photos), I am convinced that being able to do this to get extra space is a really great idea.
The Sony and Handera PDA also have a truly evolutionary advantage ripped from RIM. They have a scroll wheel and an auxiliary button. The scroll wheel not only acts like an up-down button, but is used as a most interesting app selector in the default Palm launcher. The auxiliary button usually acts as the Home/Launcher button, when when a dialog box appears, this button (which is where your thumb would be if you held the PDA with your left hand) acts the same as if you hit "OK" or "Done" with your stylus. This is an excellent time saver, and after playing with this feature on a Clie, I believe that is it a really strong enhancer for productivity and efficiency.
> What else would be revolutionary? Voice control, or thought control,
> mmhh.
Where's the vibrating alarm? The m5xx series has this, and it makes total sense for this type of device. The closest that Handspring has is the totally useless blinking LED alarm for the Prism and Pro.
And where's the sound quality? Maybe most people don't use it for this, but I play movies and I want to occasionally listen to mp3 files and suchlike. It costs just a few bucks to hack your Visor to get an audio out jack for higher quality sound via external headphones or speakers. Mass produced, it'd probably add only a buck or perhaps even less to the per unit cost. And they could add much more than a dollar to the price premium for this. Look at Sony! Their Clie 710C has *lower colour quality* than the 610C and has a cheapo audio jack, and they get away with selling it for TONS MORE!
Additionally, I really want to be able to have both external memory *and* expansion modules in at the same time. My Novatel Minstrel-S module is really slow, so I need to maximize on cache size. I can't do that on even a 16MB Pro. But if I had an MMC or Smart Media or Memory Stick or Compact Flash slot in the device, I could point my Blazer cache onto the memory card (this is assuming that Handspring would make the tiny modifications to allow Blazer to support this, like through VFS or something) and my internet performance would improve dramatically, since I would hardly ever have to reload images and pages except for when they actually change!
I'm starting to think that Springboard may have been a curse in disguise. It takes up loads of PDA real estate, yet you could do the same thing by having a CF adaptor. Look at the Handera 330! It has a CF adaptor which can use both CF memory and CF accessories, which include internet access accessories (including 802.11b) and the IBM Microdrive. Meanwhile, these accessories tend to cost *less* than similar Springboard modules. I mean, geez! The only 802.11b module for Springboard costs an insane three hundred bucks! And that Handera can go on the internet at the same time as you can plug in an MMC memory card, so you can (I presume) potentially download large files directly to this storage from the internet!
There are tons of stuff that Handspring could have done to innovate past the y2k Visors, even in evolutionary ways. The audio jack would have taken next to no effort. Vibrating alarm wouldn't have been *too* much to implement. Some of the other stuff would be harder, yes, but Handspring did almost NOTHING to improve their lines. They're riding on the success of the springboard, and other than that there's really no reason to get, say, a Neo over a Clie S320 or a Pro over a Handera 330!
I love my Visor (even though it's currently having some serious stability problems). And I really, really, really want to upgrade to a better Visor so that I can continue using my MemPlug and Minstrel-S. But I feel that Handspring is letting me down by offering inferior products with little innovation for equal or higher prices than competing PalmOS devices, and it makes me very sad. 
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
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, so everybody elevate them guns a little lower and recognize the new models for what they are: minor updates to keep Handspring ahead where they've always excelled: the entry level market.
09-15-2001 04:47 AM
And I am also
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