Hey Jeff,
I am actually VERY familiar with handhelds. I’ve used them for over 10 years, was network administrator for a school that had dozens of them and maintained them as well as network administrator for law firms running on blackberrys. In fact I have a drawer with 8 old PDA’s sitting in it (my own museum of them).
I agree that a $300 PDA makes sense if you’re looking for a PDA and you can try it out without spending a lot. You can even get some decent PDA’s for less. The rolls royce doesn’t make sense as it’s still slow and very expensive, and limited versus a full tablet. The Palm OS was stable and ran great, unfortunatley Windows Mobile doesn’t. I hope palm’s OS is reinvigorated by going to a linux core, but it doesn’t look that way as Windows is squashing them. I’m keeping my eye on the new nokia tablets running linux as a possibility but they are still a little week.
I have yet to see a PDA program on a 2.5 inch screen that you can enter in data faster than a 7" to 10" screen. That just does not make sense. If you can see 50 comments on the tablet, and 5 on a pda, how does the pda make it faster? PDA’s are great for guys who really want to hold something in their hand and walk around room to room and don’t want a large tablet. That’s why the Q1 and other UMPC’s have come into the market and fit in perfectly offering the best of both worlds.
The HP iPaq 4700 is nice, it has a 4" inch screen which isn’t bad, 600mhz processor which isn’t bad, but it still only has 64 megs of ram and 128mb of rom. How can something with that little memory import a hundred photographs, resize them automatically, then allow you to photo edit them. Especially if you’re taking pics at 3megapixels or above. You’d have a hard time.
I realize the other top programs have a PDA option. And in fact when someone calls me and says they really want a PDA program, I happily tell them who to go check out. I’ve looked at running my program on the iPhone as it can run a reduced version of java and I could do it without too much modification, but still think it a bad idea, maybe I’ll be proven wrong at some point.
The thing is, I sell multiple programs a week to people who call me and say they use x software program on their PDA and they are unhappy with it. They don’t like the size, speed and other inconveniences. If they would just use the full version of the software program they’d probably still be happy. I guess I’m afraid at leaving a bad feeling with guys. I did put together a small version about a year ago and gave it to a company with 30 inspectors to test out who’d been using our program on tablets. Out of the 30, none of them liked the PDA better. That could be because I did a bad job trying to squeeze things onto the small screen, but I think it’s because things are so much more efficient on the larger screen that people don’t want to be shrunk down.
I’ve gone to a few NACHI meetings and each time ended up talking to someone who bought the PDA and normal version of software and switched to the normal version, PDA remains unused.
I do concede, you’ve been around a lot longer than I have and maybe I did make a bad run at it the first time and I’m wrong. I do have inspectors using my insurance software on Treo’s running on the Palm OS but those are for 2-4 page insurance inspections.
This actually sounds like a good idea for a poll, which I think I’ll go make. I’m very interested in seeing the responses.