Part of the agony and the ecstasy of being human is our ability to confront the big questions. What's the meaning of existence? Is there life after death? And which is better: the Palm or the Pocket PC?
Of course, that last question isn't really fair. It's like asking, "Which is better: a mango or a shoehorn?" The two palmtop families were designed for completely different purposes. Palms and Palm compatibles are small, fast, simple, inexpensive organizers meant to keep your calendar and addresses synchronized with your computer. A Pocket PC is Microsoft's effort to shrink a complete Windows PC into a tiny slab, complete with color, sound and expansion slots, closer to a laptop than a calculator.
Microsoft's early attempts at its mobile operating system, called Windows CE, were disastrous. The company's usual design approach prevailed -- the more features, the better -- and big, complex, expensive and wildly unpopular palmtops that Microsoft called Palm-sized PC's were the result. Still, Microsoft soldiered on with refinements, as it often does in the face of failure.
In its third attempt, the company has devised a palmtop design that's genuinely useful and increasingly popular. About 1.25 million people have bought what Microsoft has renamed Pocket PC devices. With 12 million in circulation, the Palm operating system still far outsells its rival, but Pocket PC is gaining.
What technophiles love about Pocket PCs is that they do more than Palms and Palm-compatibles. The feature list would stretch to Bill Gates' house and back 23 times. Chief among their assets are bright, beautiful color screens that dwarf the standard Palm screen: 240 by 320 pixels, versus 160 square. (You have to wonder why Palm can't buy the same magnificent screens for use in its palmtops; surely Pocket PC makers aren't the only ones with access to the Singapore Yellow Pages.)
A microphone for voice memos is also standard Pocket PC equipment. Using the speaker or stereo headphones, you can also listen to MP3 files (but budget a few hundred dollars for memory-expansion cards to hold them). Pocket PCs come with more built-in memory, too; the bestselling Compaq iPaq 3600, for example, comes with up to 64 megabytes (although Windows itself sucks away 5 of them). A Pocket PC comes with a power cord, too. That's fortunate, because the battery charge is notoriously short -- six or seven hours.
Lots of cool software is built in, including stripped-down versions of Word, Excel and Internet Explorer -- the bread, butter and wine of corporate America. There's even a tiny version of Windows Media Player, which can play movies. (Short movies, that is. Don't buy the hype about using your Pocket PC as in-flight entertainment unless you're flying only from Times Square to Central Park.)
All of these features are available for the Palm OS, too, but no one model comes with all of them built in. Even so, Palms and Palm-compatibles outsell Pocket PCs for some good reasons. Pocket PCs are still bigger and heavier; don't expect to carry yours in a shirt pocket unless you're wearing overalls. Remember, too, that the Pocket PC has only 10 percent of the market, and therefore fewer companies have designed add-on programs and accessories for it. (Microsoft is learning what it's like to be Apple.)
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