A Pocket PC Full of Miracles? New Orleans LA

Posted by : Jon L. Jacobi

Like many overhyped competitions, the confrontation between Microsoft and Palm Computing for the PDA market turned out to be no contest. The no-nonsense,function-first design philosophy of the Palm Pilot and its spawn handily defeated Microsoft's attempt to fit a desktop operating system into a form factor too small for it.

Despite advantages such as audio recording and easier interfacing with Microsoft's popular desktop applications, Windows CE PDAs represent feature overkill for most users. An overly complex user interface, high price, and poor battery life are generally the deal killers on Windows-based handhelds.

But Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. The folks in Redmond went back to the drawing board and came up with an improved version--the Pocket PC.

As hardware, Pocket PCs are very powerful. The one I've got is the 9-ounce,silver-and-slate-colored Casio E-115. Its 240-by-320-pixel, 65,536-color, TFT liquid-crystal display is luscious with brightness to spare. The unit's 16MB of ROM contains the built-in programs and operating system, and a whopping 32MB of RAM runs applications and stores additional programs and files. A 131MHzprocessor provides the horses for MP3 audio and MPEG-1 video playback. But the price is a hefty $599.95--$150 more than the Palm IIIc.

I enjoyed using the E-115's physical interface tremendously. A four-way rocker button on the front panel allows easy cursor movement and game play. On the left si...

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