Eight Reasons to Buy a Handheld Computer
Why indeed, in the age of smartphones? Truth is that smartphones costing more than Rs.15000 can only match the functionality of a handheld that costs Rs.10000. Take my Palm Tungsten E for example, I’ve owned it for two years and I find new uses for it everyday. Some things I use it for are :-
- Portable Music Player - You can get a 256MB SD card for less than Rs.2000 these days, and the best part is, with handhelds, unlike MP3 players, you can use the latest codecs. I currently use mpeg-4, which gives the the quality of MP3 (same bitrate) at 1/3rd the file size. :tup:
- Portable Video Player - Another very good use, in 160 x 160 (very viewable on handhelds) with decently good sound, a 60 minute file sizes at 60 mb only, so you can carry two movies on a 256mb memory card. With processors over 200 MHz, you can use double the resolution.
- Read Books - Adobe Acrobat Reader and other software are freely available for handhelds and because they have larger screens than mobile phones than mobile phones, reading and bookmarking are much easier.
- Office Work and Internet - You can always connect your handheld to almost any mid-segment phone and read emails, surf the internet. Create and edit presentations, documents, and spreadsheets on the handheld and it also works as a laptop replacement in board meetings.
- Portable Gaming - Trust Me, they’re much better than java games on mobile phones, graphics are much better than you would expect and these games are even better than gameboy advance games. Consider them between GBA and PSP/DS standards.
- Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and more reference stuff is availible all over the net. For free palm software, you can go to www.freewarepalm.com and for pocket pc’s, there’s www.freewareppc.com
- Personal Organiser - Because of a touchscreen inteface, using a handheld for memo’s, remiders, and calendars is much easier than doing the same with a phone’s numerical keypad.
- Control Your PC from Anywhere - Get a software like palmVNC for your handheld and control your PC from the palm of your hand from anywhere. All you need is a decent internet connection.
What more can you ask for?
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I’d say, having a smartphone has its own benefits. Its one gadget compared to two(mobile phone & PDA). The screen of a smartphone has more colours than the PDA(usually). The only smartphone costing Rs.25000 that I know of is Nokia 7710 & its with touchscreen like a handheld & its got a 90MB memory(& comes with a 128MB MMC Card) & a megapixel camera, with FM Radio & Flash Player. Not bad I’d say!! It can do whatever a PDA can, like reading documents, media player, etc. And gaming in Flash is a lot cooler.
Who says you can’t get flash gaming on a palm, just download the beta that was used in CLIE’s, but i agree, both have their own benefits, but that good ol tungsten e helps me a lot. Without it, i don’t think i can survive a 9 hour train journey in an all-seater.
I am using Palm Zire 31 for last 6 months. I have 256MB SD memory card and 16MB internal memory. I did download lot of games from various sites. More than that I use my palm to read books. There is a site “manybooks.net” which offers thousand of books for free download. These are all the classic titles.
I am quite happy about the product. I chose this model over Zire 72 because the difference in cost was almost 5000/-and the only aditional feature was camera. As I am already using a digital camera I didn’t want one in my PDA. Most important for me is to keep track of appointments and birthday/anniversary, which this Palmtop is taking care of. I have a real player installed, to listen to mp3 songs.
I want to know if there is any attachment like the one for ipod for receiving FM? Because I miss FM very much. And If I want to watch a movie how can I do it? I tried kinoma player form “kinoma.com” but the download is very slow and the file format is not compatible with wmv or mov files.
Thanks
No, there’s no FM accessory that I know of. If you could share some more good sites having Palm software, that’d be great.
I like to download whatever is available for free. So I have searched so many sites that offer applications or games that really work. Such sites are really rare. Download.com is one such site. But ever since they have changed the look of this site I am finding it more complicated and most of the download do not start. You keep on waiting for a long time without knowing what is happening. I will be most happy to share if I come across any interesting site for palm software in future.
But you did not reply about video player for my palm..
Bye and thanks
Sharmila