Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

So, I’ve joined the dark side. I’ve left the Palm™ PDA camp and bought a Windows Mobile(satan) device.

Simply put, I am not going to sit around patiently and wait for Palm to get their act together any longer. I’ve been putting up with the quirks of my aging Tungsten|T, which is about four years old now, for far too long. Most recently, it decided to summarily delete all my contacts during a syncing operation.

Let’s not even mention the fact that King Henry VIII was still on his first wife the last time Palm updated the Mac version of the Palm Desktop software for the Mac. Heck, they haven’t even bothered to release a version that works with Vista yet!

Even worse is the fact that their OS has needed attention for years. When I bought my Tungsten a few years ago, it was already long in the tooth … Basically the same thing I’d gotten on my original Palm III, except with color slapped on top.

Since then they’ve produced a totally new version of the OS - one that never saw the light of day - and then started yet another rewrite, this time based on Linux. Right now it seems up in the air if this version will actually be released before Duke Nukem 3D.

So … I purchased a Windows Mobile PDA. Overall, I’m quite happy with it. The handwriting recognition is much better then the Palms ever was. OK, I Know the Palm technically didn’t do handwriting recognition. But, this device does. In fact, I can write several words on the screen at one time… Which is exatly how I’in writing this blog entry.

Compared with the Palm, this is a dream to enter text into. Yes, it does make mistakes. But overall it’s ven , very accurate. I’m very happy that I don’t have to use one of those blasted thumb Keyboards. By golly we’ve made too much progress with computers to require people to have to use a sadistic text entry method like that.

So far, I’ve only got two complaints about this thing. First, when you launch an app, there is a button with an “X” in the top right hand corner. This button does NOT to what you might expect. That’s right, it doesn’t close the application you are running. It actually hides it. I made this unfortunate discovery last night when the PDA complained that it didn’t have enough memory to launch another program. Inexplicably, the vast majority of applications don’t have an “exit” option in their menu. Fortunately, I’ve found an app that allows me to easily close an app so that I don’t have this problem again.

Second issue: many applications come with a Windows installer package that must be run from a Windows desktop machine. Since I’m a Mac user, this presented a minor problem. At first I thought I would just use Virtual PC. That was a no-go because Microsoft ActiveSync doesn’t want to work with VPC. Strike one.

Then I tried on my Vista desktop. That failed because MS has integrated ActiveSync into Vista, and the installers didn’t recognize it. Strike two.

So, I ended up using my wife’s XP desktop to install the software in question. Home run!

Fortunately, I won’t be installing software on here on a regular basis.

Besides that, I’m in PDA heaven or at least until Apple announced the iPod Touch yesterday. Anybody want to buy a slightly used ASUS MyPal A626?