Palm for Pocket PC Users, Part 229 December 2003 Okay, first things first. Most people that buy PDAs buy them for life management above all. Scheduling, contacts, task lists and notes are paramount. So how does the Palm match up versus Pocket Outlook? Surprisingly well, actually. The built-in apps haven't changed much, unless you have the newest Palms like the Tungstens E and T3, but there's lots of help out there to compensate for what Pocket Outlook does well. DateBk5 (the Palm analog of super-PIM Pocket Informant on the Pocket PC) does everything you could ask for in a time/contact manager, including repeating tasks, color-coded everything and more. If you need all the bells and whistles to see your schedule exactly how you want it, this mercurial program is the way to go. On the other hand, if you're an Agenda Fusion user on the Pocket PC looking for sleek integration and well thought out details over sheer feature count, Agendus might be the PalmOS PIM for you. Agendus is more contact-focused (while DateBk5 appeals to task-focused types) and makes it dead-easy to create and log new tasks and phone calls based on contacts. If you do have one of the new Tungstens in mind, you might not need either. The Tungstens E and T3 sync beautifully with Outlook and fully support things like categories and locations on appointments, multiple addresses in contacts, and repeating, alarmed tasks. The single biggest reason I switched from the Palm to the Pocket PC in the first place was that the Pocket PC Inbox application had nothing even close on the Palm. I wanted the ability to sync my PDA with my Outlook mail, not just the Inbox (I have filters set up to automatically file my email in a dozen or so different folders based on content) and not just the first 8k of the message. Inbox on the Pocket PC could do just that, ad check email live via a modem. In the past three years a lot has changed for PalmOS email clients, but the only one that can do everything I want is VersaMail. Fortunately, VersaMail is bundled with nearly every Palm. VersaMail (owned and developed by palmOne) can sync with Outlook Inbox subfolders, handle attachments (both sending and receiving), and pretty much everything else I need from an email client. In addition to syncing, VersaMail can handle pulling email live from POP3 and IMAP4 accounts if your Palm has a network connection. A big feature that draws people to the Pocket PC is Pocket Office. Consumers still tend to see PalmOS devices as simple organizers, and a lot of people that come in to my store with older PalmOS devices start looking at Pocket PCs as the next step "up". What these people don't know is that out of the box, most PalmOS devices handle Word and Excel files better than Pocket Office. PalmOne's Tungsten line and a few Sonys come with Documents To Go, which handles things like tables and styles in Word and charting in Excel flawlessly, compared to Pocket Word and Pocket Excel which simply cut out those features, removing them from the desktop versions of the files, as well. Documents To Go also handles PowerPoint presentations, something Pocket Office doesn't do at all. And while Pocket Office only has one worthy competitor, SoftMaker's excellent (if very large) TextMaker and PlanMaker, Documents To Go is just one of at least four strong office suites for PalmOS. If you don't like what came bundled with your device, you've got a lot of choices for alternatives. The Big Two for writing are WordSmith and Documents To Go, and both do a better job than Pocket Word. Neither completely measures up to TextMaker (which is in development for PalmOS), but they come closer than a Pocket PC user might realize on first glance. For example, Documents To Go doesn't provide any way to enter the date or time into a document, nor does it have a feature similar to TextMaker's SmartText or Word's AutoComplete. Why? It doesn't have to. Both of these functions can be handled just as easily (and system-wide, rather than per-application) by PalmOS's shortcuts. Write "(shortcut-symbol)dts" and you have the date and time inserted at the cursor. And since you can create shortcuts on your own, you can create them for any frequently-used phrases. The major PalmOS word processors are also more keyboard-aware than Pocket Word, though Documents To Go still needs some work in this area. It supports the basic key-mnemonics (cut, copy, paste, select-all, etc.) but keyboard support could be more fully integrated to avoid using the stylus while typing. All Pocket PCs come with Windows Media Player, capable of playing Windows Media formats (WMA audio and WMV video) as well as MP3 audio files. Until recently, this was a strong plus in the favor of Windows Powered devices. And while no PalmOS devices can play WMA files (yet), options for audiophiles are just as robust on new PalmOS devices as they are on Pocket PCs. Most of the new OS5 PalmOne devices come with RealOne's player, which, frankly, isn't very good. Sound quality is acceptable, but the player doesn't support many extras and only plays MP3s and RealOne's proprietary audio format. Sony's TJ-35 takes a step in the right direction by ditching Sony's own audio player in favor of Aerodrome Software's AeroPlayer. AeroPlayer and competitor Pocket Tunes are excellent music players for PalmOS5 devices and both support playlists, skins and playing Ogg Vorbis files as well as MP3s. Oggs are based on an open source, royalty-free codec and provide the same sound quality as MP3 at nearly one third the file size, an important consideration if you're storing all your music on SD cards rather than a hard drive. Palms aren't left out in the cold when it comes to video, either. Many PalmOne devices come bundled with Kinoma Producer, a program that functions much like Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder by scaling down video and sound to a handheld-friendly package. MPEGs and QuickTime movies run through Kinoma play on even a comparatively underpowered Palm Tungsten E (only 126MHz) with completely smooth frame rates and excellent sound (through headphones). PalmOS users can also try out MMPlayer, which plays MPEG movies directly, without a translation step (similar to Pocket Movie on the Pocket PC). MMPlayer shows a lot of potential, but it's obviously still in development. Another long-time advantage of Pocket PCs was the ability to play Audible books. For those that haven't seen Audible, it's a great way too carry digital "books on tape" that you can listen to anywhere, without carrying around anything extra, other than headphones. ARM-based PalmOS devices have the horsepower required to decode Audible's highly-compressed audio format, and the Palm version of Audible player is every bit as capable as the Pocket PC version, allowing background playback and effective control via the directional pad. File size is nearly identical on either platform, as is sound quality. In regards to "normal ebooks," the Palm isn't quite as flexible as the Pocket PC. There is no way to read Microsoft Reader .lit files on a Palm, nor does the Palm platform have anything as versatile as µBook for reading ebooks in any format. What the Palm does have is a superior reading experience. Why? In a word, resolution. Most PalmOS 5 devices sport a 320x320 color screen, 33% more than virtually all Pocket PC screens. The Sony Clié NX series, the Garmin iQue and the Palm Tungsten T3 have 320x480 screens, a full double the standard Pocket PC resolution. This makes text much sharper without resorting to tricks like sub-pixel font rendering (ClearType). Most of the major ebook formats are still supported, with Palm Reader (duh) and MobiPocket working just fine. And how do you get the books, music, movies, etc. on the device in the first place? Syncing with the PC, of course. And while Palm's HotSync Manager is far from perfect (just yesterday I saw another corrupted conduit abort the entire syncing process with no notification of what exactly was wrong), it's a far cry better than Microsoft's ActiveSync. ActiveSync does have some advantages (notably, the Internet pass-through and the ability to browse a connected PDA from the PC as if it were a network drive) but generally speaking, it's not worth the hoop-jumping it requires to work consistently. When I plug my Palm in to the USB cable and hit the sync button, 99.9% of the time I can just walk away and know everything will be fine when I get back. I've talked to Pocket PC users that have switched to Palm who are just amazed at how effortless syncing is on the Palm compared to what they had considered "normal" on the Pocket PC. The double-edged sword of Palm syncing is conduits. On the up side, there are a lot of PalmOS programs that provide their own conduits for syncing. This makes outliners, financial programs and other software much more usable because you can do the bulk data entry on the desktop. The downside to these is that the more conduits you have installed, the more likely that one of them will step on another. I've learned to be careful and uninstall (or at least disable) conduits I'm no longer using. With very few exceptions, Pocket PC users can now find PalmOS alternatives for everything they do on the Pocket PC, and switching to the Palm camp isn't the downgrade it used to be. More to the point, many Pocket PC users may find that life is easier on the Palm side of the fence. If you haven't used a Palm in a couple years, try one out and see if it feels right. You might be surprised. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |