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So What's So Great About The Pocket PC, Anyway?

1 October 2001

Last week, I covered a roundup of software to help Palm users make the transition to the Pocket PC. Some of my readers got the wrong message from this. More than one reader questioned why to switch if the Pocket PC just does the same stuff as the Palm.

When I came up with the idea for this column, I thought it would be much like the last one, a list of cool applications with brief comments on what they do. But the more I looked, the more I realized that what makes the Pocket PC so compelling isn't some "killer app" that just has no Palm equivalent (although some Pocket PC games, like Chopper Alley, simply can't exist on the Palm). The "killer app" on the Pocket PC is the Pocket PC itself, and how much easier is makes my life.

Note: What follows is very Microsoft-centric. The Pocket PC is a Microsoft product, and a great deal of the advantage it conveys has to do with how well it integrates with other Microsoft products. Like most PC users, I have a Windows-based PC, use Internet Explorer for my web browser, Microsoft Office for productivity and Outlook for mail and PIM. If you're one of those people for whom "It's not made by Microsoft" is a selling point, most of what follows will be irrelevant. Then again, you're also probably used to finding workarounds for the "default" way of doing things, so it might not bother you.

The Palm is billed as simple. That's their biggest selling point. We hear about the "Zen of Palm" all the time. What surprised me in moving from the Clié to the Pocket PC was that the touted simplicity of PalmOS evaporates once you try to use more than just the core PIM apps (this shouldn't have been a big surprise; I'd railed against this in "Stop the Complexity!" back in June 2000). For more advanced PDA use, the tightly integrated Pocket PC is much simpler than the kludged together Palm.

For example, lets look at a relatively simple, relatively popular task: listening to digital music on the go. The only PalmOS device that can do this out of the box is the Clié N700C series. There are MP3 add-ons for other PalmOS devices, but those are even more complicated to use, so let's focus on the Clié. In order to listen to music on the Clié, one must do the following:

  1. Install OpenMG Jukebox from the Clié CD-ROM. Even if you don't want to spend extra money to use Sony's white MagicGate sticks and ATRAC3 format, you have to install this to install the driver for Windows that allows you mount the Memory Stick as a removable drive.
  2. Install Real Jukebox from the Clié CD-ROM, which in turn installs Real Player. This is what you use to rip and transfer MP3 files if you don't use ATRAC3.
  3. Optional: uninstall OpenMG Jukebox if you don't want a program you aren't going to use chewing up your hard drive space. Not much of an issue for those of you with shiny 60GB hard drives, but I only have 3GB on my laptop, and only half of that for my system partition.
  4. Rip the CD with Real Jukebox.
  5. Install the Real Jukebox plugin that allows it to copy files to the Clié.
  6. Put the Clié in the cradle.
  7. Run Audio Player on the Clié.
  8. Enter Transfer Mode in Audio Player to mount the Memory Stick as a removable drive on your PC.
  9. Select the tracks you want to transfer, and let Real Jukebox copy them to the Clié. They will be re-encoded on the fly to 96 bps, 44.1KHz if you ripped them lower than that to save space. This is because the Clié can only read MP3s at 44.1KHz, and Real Jukebox automatically drops the frequency to 22KHz for bitrates under 96.
  10. You only get one playlist on the Clié, and you're stuck with the order in which the files were copied. If you want to reorder them, you have to delete them and copy them again.
  11. Exit out of Transfer Mode before removing the Clié from the cradle.

Sounds like a pain in the butt, and it is. What's the process on the Pocket PC?

  1. Open Windows Media Player (which was mostly likely already installed by either Windows or Internet Explorer).
  2. Click on CD Audio and click on Copy Files.
  3. Put your Pocket PC in the cradle.
  4. Click on Portable Device in Windows Media Player.
  5. Select the tracks you want, then click Copy. The tracks will be converted to space-saving WMA format, which offers the advantages of Sony's ATRAC3 without requiring more expensive special media or annoying "checkout" procedures.
  6. Remove the Pocket PC from the cradle and build your playlist as you see fit.

See how much easier that was? No special drivers to install, nothing to do at all on the PDA while it's cradled, and you're using entirely software that you probably already have installed on your hard drive. It took me a week to figure out how to get MP3 files to play consistently on the Clié (the 44.1KHz limitation is not well documented, and I wanted to use lower bitrate files to save space), and only a few minutes to transfer tunes to my iPaq for the first time, and most of that was the time it took to rip and transfer the tracks.

The PalmOS architecture is full of hacked-together workarounds like this that the Pocket PC handles so much more elegantly. I'll give you another example.

In the course of researching these columns I read a ton of stuff on the web, and naturally, with my mobile, PDA-centric bent, I tend to read most of that material on the go when I'm away from my PC. To save articles for later reading while I surf, I have to do the following on the Clié:

  1. Bring up the printable version of the article (this tends to have simpler one-column formatting that works well on a small screen).
  2. Save the HTML to a folder on my hard drive.
  3. Open that folder.
  4. Drag the saved HTML documents to either iSiloWeb or MakeDocW.
  5. Hotsync.

To save the same articles for the Pocket PC, I would:

  1. Bring up the printable version of the article.
  2. Save the HTML to a subfolder of the Pocket PC My Documents folder on my hard drive.

That's it. The HTML can be read unconverted in Pocket Internet Explorer, and it synchronizes to the device the instant I save it, since the Pocket PC keeps itself in synchronization with the PC constantly while it's in the cradle. Frequently I'd save stuff to read on my Clié, only to find out later that I'd either forgotten to convert the articles to a Palm-readable format or I'd forgotten to sync them to the Clié before leaving my PC. With a Pocket PC and ActiveSync, this never happens. Starting to get the picture yet?

The fact that the Pocket PC is a pocketable PC conveys some major advantages, a big one being that the Pocket PC can read most desktop file formats without conversion. The Palm is very different this way. The Palm was designed first and foremost as an organizer, and the entire structure of the device reinforces this. Everything on the Palm, including applications, is a database. The PalmOS doesn't understand "files" in the traditional computer sense. This means that everything on the Palm needs to be converted to a Palm database before it can be used. WordSmith, great as it is, doesn't actually read RTF files. It reads Palm databases that mimic RTF files. There are a few programs for the Clié that read things like JPEG images or MP3 music files off of the storage card, but for the most part, using files on the Palm requires converting them to databases PalmOS understands. This extra translation step isn't necessary on the Pocket PC. Pocket Word may work faster with Pocket Word format files, but it can work quite well with Word 2000 or RTF format files if it has to. Better, I can save files to a Compact Flash card, hand that card to someone who can mount the CF card as a drive on their laptop, and they can read the files without any additional conversion.

One area where this conversion issue shows up best is multimedia. The Clié can play MP3 and ATRAC3 files without conversion, and that's a good start. But although Sony touts the Clié as being able to handle video as well, it's not video in any format you're likely to see on the web. Pocket PCs can play Windows Media and even MPEG video, but the Clié can't. It has to convert them to something else first. Not to mention that until the ARM-based PalmOS devices come out, video on the even the Clié is limited to about five frames per second, about one fifth of what would be fast enough to seem smooth to the human eye.

Another area where the Pocket PC's integration excels is communications. I never seriously tried to do mail or Usenet discussions on my Visor. I did start to play around in this area on my Clié. I'd sync the Palm Mail program with Outlook Express, and I installed Yanoff for Usenet, including the quirky Java conduit. Rather than deal with the bloated Palm version of AvantGo, I used SiteScooper (which required installing Perl) to save news websites in standard Doc format that I could read in WordSmith. It was a pain to get all of this working consistently, as most of it required hacked-together solutions. I shudder to think of what people who aren't web developers must think of modifying SiteScooper's Perl config files. And even when it all worked, I couldn't update my mail away from home, and I couldn't update Yanoff without the expensive and bulky Sony modem.

On the Pocket PC, AvantGo is seamlessly integrated into Pocket Internet Explorer. Inbox syncs not only with my Outlook mail when I'm at home, but automatically pulls in the latest from my Yahoo POP3 account whenever I drop my Pocket PC into the cradle at my office. While I have it cradled, I can use Desktop Passthrough to borrow my office desktop's Internet access to update Usenet news in Ink Spot as well. Even when I have to use third party apps on the Pocket PC (Ink Spot), it's less of a headache than achieving similar results would be on a Palm.

And speaking of "hacked-together", there are very few real hacks for the Pocket PC. They just aren't needed as much as they would be on the more limited PalmOS. Let's look at some of the hacks I had installed on the Palm:

  • Fitaly, PopUpCalc:while the functionality to install a different on-screen keyboard layout or a quick calculator required patching the OS on the Palm, on the Pocket PC both are supplied as installable input methods, just as safe as Transcriber. For the calculator, I use Developer One's RapidCalc.
  • McPhling: a quick task-switching application that's duplicated by apps like iTask on the iPaq as well as the Start Menu itself.
  • PopUpNames:Unnecessary in a multi-tasking operating system where you can just pull up the normal Contacts app from a hardware button.
  • ClockPop: Unnecessary when you have a clock on the title bar of every application.

The Palm is a great PIM. If you only plan to use a PDA as a digital DayTimer, low-end PalmOS devices like the Palm m100 series or Sony S320 offer a lot of bang for the buck. But once you start to use the PDA as a real computer, start to do things with it like communications, multimedia, office document manipulaton, the Palm gets twitchy as the complexity rises, as you start trying to coax lots of different, unrelated products into working together as a whole. On the Pocket PC, most of those bases are covered by an integrated whole of applications pre-installed on the device. When you do need to go outside the device, features like an explorable file system and desktop passthrough network sharing make the Pocket PC a more flexible and familiar tool.

It comes down to this. A high-end PalmOS device like the Clié can be embellished into providing similar capabilities to the Pocket PC. On either platform, I can do word processing, email, web browsing, games, spreadsheets, finances and of course, schedule and contact management. The difference is that on my Clié I spent more time configuring and maintaining my device than I spent working. On my Pocket PC, I just work.

Jeff Kirvin
Jeff@writingonyourpalm.net