Four years ago Palm created the first successful PDA.
Today it holds an 80% share of the market for handheld computers. Its most serious
competition is a family of devices from various vendors based on the Windows CE
operating system. In some ways the competition between these two systems is reminiscent
of the earlier Macintosh-Windows battle. Users become familiar with a device and
develop strong preferences.The Palm OS was originally designed for a device with
512K of memory and no hard disk. Subsequent models doubled and redoubled available
memory until the current generations of devices (IIIxe, Vx, IIIc) have 8M RAM
at the same or lower prices than the original model. Although the Palm OS was
modified to allow use of larger memory, it retains its original base architecture
and processing speed. It is almost impossible for an ordinary user to use anywhere
near the full 8M. Windows CE is a scaled down version of the Windows 9x operating
system. Just booting the system seems to use up 3M of the RAM, and with Pocket
versions of Word, Excel, IE, and (in some models) Access it is fairly simple to
fill a typical 16 or 32M systems.
CE devices typically have a slot for a plug
in "Compact Flash card". The most common use for the card is to add
32 to 128M of non-volatile memory to hold large files as an alternative to disk
storage. Although CE appears to be big and sloppy, it is not architecturally constrained
by a small memory design. Early versions of CE were unsuccessful because the hardware
had not caught up with the design. Today the available processor and memory technology
can support CE competitively with Palm. In subsequent generations of technology,
CE may be more flexibly designed to take advantage of additional power. Until
recently, a Palm system cost $300 to $450 while CE systems typically cost $600
to $800.
