On Friday, Tony Clark wrote:

> The above information is a bit inaccurate. If you
> want to play MP3s on your Palm you can simply copy
> them over to an SD card on your PC with no conversion
> whatsoever. Palm uses a standed PC folder structure
> for these files. Likewise you can move GIF and JPEG
> files directly to the Palm. I belive that AVI files
> can be accomodated with a third party video player
> too.

That may well be the case - to be honest, when I had
PalmOS devices I didn't bother with mp3, photo or any
video files at all. However, I think the point still
holds that other file formats are not so easy to
move from desktop to Palm. Word documents, spread-
sheets, etc, all have to go through a conversion,
unless you use third party applications. Again - not
very many of my clients use Word and Excel documents
on their handheld - I personally have a few but only
for reference. But the whole FAT directory structure
of PocketPC is just a lot easier to use and get your
head around than the Palm system. At least for me!

> No disrespect intended but do you really do photo
> editing on a PDA?

Yes - in a fairly basic way. Just last weekend I was
at a family gathering. Took photo's on the digital
camera, put the CF card into the Axim. Copied each of
the 3MB files to my SD card and cropped and resized
them to 800x600 and emailed them from my Axim using
my wifi card and a wireless network. Needless to say,
the rest of the family in Australia were delighted
to be able to see the photo's just minutes after they
were taken.

> You must have some incredible eyes! LOL The Palm
> displays photos quite nicely, but I can't imagine
> editing them, expect maybe for a simple cropping
> operation.

With the VGA screen of the Axim, I am happy to edit
by cropping, re-sizing, sharpening, etc. Of course,
they are never going to be as good as when done on
the desktop for printing, but for emailing out on
the spot, it's great.

> And what about movies? Personally I haven't seen a
> PDA yet that I would want to watch a movie on, the
> screen is just too small regardless of the resolution.

The week before the above family fathering I and my
three boys were staying with my in-laws for a saturday
night. Of course, I didn't want to be up till the early
hours discussing politics with my wife's parents, so I
took myself to bed, plugged the charger into the wall
and my headphones nto the Axim and quite happily watched
Insomnia and the Dark Side Of The Wall classic album
documentary. The screen was a perfect size for laying
in bed with it propped up on your chest.

> Of course if your company runs some other application
> like Lotus Notes or Unix base SMTP mail instead of
> Exchange/Outlook then you're kind of hosed with PPC,
> you'll have to load Outlook to synch with the PDA. At
> least Palm gives you an option to sync the data onto
> a PC with Palm Desktop.

Agreed - but then my clients don't work for companies
with set-ups like that. My clients run small businesses
and in general have MS Office and Outlook installed. I
gave up trying to push alternatives like OpenOffice and
have learned to accept that MS does own almost all the
desktops out there. If I were advising a much larger
organisation on handhelds, then I would have to look
at alternatives if they were running anything other
Exchange, etc.

> Palm can do all that too, although some Palms do not
> have wireless capability.

Do any Palm devices have WiFi built in? One of the big
reasons for my move away from PalmOS was the lack of
built-in WiFi. Lots have bluetooth, some have the ability
to use SD WiFi cards. Many do not. To my mind, WiFi is
about the biggest area that Palm have ****ed up in.

> While I do enjoy gaming quite a bit neither Palm nor
> PPC is really the best gaming handheld.

Bery, very true. I've not tried the Gameboy/PS emulators
and am happy with Bejeweled, Monopoly and a couple of
other nice simple, slow and quiet games!

--
Bryan Anderson