I'm a late comer to the world of PDAs...

In fact I was a late comer to laptops as well... and PC's ...

but not UNIX & Linux... the first computer I used ran UNIX and I've immersed myself in that field and its subsequent generations right through out my career.  I digress...  As I was saying, I'm a late comer to the world of PDAs.  In fact I had largely ignored them until I had the opportunity to discuss a software development project with a client back in 2005 that potentially involved a roll out of 500 PDAs.  This gave me the excuse to have a play with them and as I was working for a major Brisbane based integrator at the time, I was able to get an HP iPAC to play with.

The first thing that struck me about the HP was the awkwardness of Windows Pocket PC.  It didn't seem to make sense.  Ok, it wasn't hard to poke around and find things... but it didn't work intuitively.  Secondly, all I needed to do was to forget to charge it everyday... miss one day and the thing went flat and lost all my data... ok I should have sync'd Outlook more often but thats another story (ie don't get me started on Outlook!).  It came as a surprise to find that there was no comprehensive backup mechanism built in. (hey how hard is it to backup 256Mb of stuff?),

Well, after 3 weeks, I sent the eval unit back and decided that PDAs weren't for me.

A week later, a friend showed me his Palm Tungsten T5... I thought yeh, yeh, see these things, not impressed.  However, I had a play anyway... and hey, the thing made sense!  It seemed intuitive and I though, gee, these things are better than I thought.  I went home and read some reviews online and was impressed when I saw that the T5: a) had flash so didn't loose everything when the bettery ran out, b) had a battery that actually lasted several days, c) had a backup process that was inherent in its design.  I was sold.

Three weeks later I had my Palm T5 and nearly two years later, I'm still impressed and think its great.  One thing I did do was to install a great piece of software called Iambic Agendus Pro which along with its Windows companion software makes the best calendar and task management software I have ever come across.  Its only downfall is that unless you use the Outlook version, it doesn't sync with anything else... but given my role, thats not important (yet!... hopefully they will address this sooner or later).

So, you may ask, why does my headline say I don't like Palm? Well, I like my Palm but I don't like the way Palm are heading.  It's sad to see yet another innovative company go down what I believe is a path to non-existance simply because they stopped innovating... no, Life Drive is not innovative (just obvious) and Treo they bought from Handspring (the guys who invented the Palm in the first place).  So with the coming onslaught of Apple's iPhone, what are Palm doing?... well from all I can tell, pretty much nothing.

By the time iPhone hits Australian shores next year, I'll be ready to upgrade my T5 (one of the kids is dying to get it when I'm finished with it)... the question is... will Palm have something tempt me at that stage?... I hope so... but I fear not.