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Subject: Re: The Dell Axim X5 is not "just" a PDA.

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 09:25:54 10/04/03

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On October 03, 2003 at 22:45:36, Timothy J. Frohlick wrote:

>You must admit that, compared to the PDAs
>of a few years ago, todays machines are more PC-like in that they integrate and
>"sync" with PC programs like Excel and Word.

They are more PC-like than they were a few years ago, but *most* of them are
still not very PC-like at all IMO. I bought a nice one a while back and I almost
never used it (at least not more than I would have used a very, very cheap PDA,
or a little pad of paper and a pen). I use my computer for mostly is programming
and doing things online, neither of which are very easy or financially practical
to do on a PDA, but it's getting better.

There is now a decent solution to my first problem (not being able to program on
a PDA). The Zaurus from Sharp is right there with the other PDAs in terms of
computational ability (400 MHz XScale, 96 MB memory, etc.), but they use a linux
based operating system. I imagine that the casual PDA user would never know any
difference, but from what I've heard and read, you can actually use this PDA to
do just about anything you could do in linux, from programming to running a web
server to recompiling the kernel to your liking. Now the only question remaining
for me is, do I really want to program on a PDA with that tiny "keyboard"? :)

As for being on the internet with a PDA, it seems like there are reasonably
priced plans for getting online with your PDA, although still not exactly cheap.
I think you would probably pay as much for a high speed cable internet
connection as you could for wireless PDA net access.

>In addition, you and I understand
>that the first PDAs came with 8000 Byte RAM memories and todays units come with
>up to 1,000,000,000 Byte memories.

I don't think any PDAs are coming with 1GB of memory just yet ;-)



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