[BUGA] Mobile phone/PDA recommendations?

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 16:57, David Newall wrote:
> I think you'll find, to your even greater disappointment, that not only
> are the more interesting ones Microsoft-based, but they work better on a
> Microsoft platform than they would on a Linux platform.  In particular,
> Wince's handwriting recognition is superb.  Much easier to use than some
> half-arsed on-screen keyboard, and doesn't require you to learn the
> PDA's way like Graffiti-based units.  I played with a iPaq back when it
> was still Compaq who made them, and it really put me off PDA's because,
> if I couldn't have one running Linux, that worked as well as the iPaq,
> then I'd have just have to settle for the damned iPaq, Windows and all,
> and that frankly stuck in my craw.

I find all handwriting recognition sucks, but I have terrible hand writing and 
most humans find it hard to parse.

I like the idea of graffiti - it is not hard to learn and it is reasonably 
error resistant.

Now I use Quikwriting which is quite a clever idea. It is harder to learn, but 
has a much lower error rate.

> I think your list is quite good, but I'd add that you need to place a
> high-emphasis on both screen and battery.  For example a Linux-based
> unit with perfect speech recognition would be of unacceptable utility if
> it only had a 320x240 8-bit-colour screen, or if it only worked for an
> hour on a charge.

I suspect the technology won't be up to what he wants.
Then again I think using a Unixy system with a PDA interface would be a big 
pile of suck. A stylus is not a good interface for text entry.

I have been tempted to buy an XDA II but by old PDA sprang back to life so I 
haven't done that.

Be aware that if you have a PocketPC based device it will be 
difficult/impossible to sync with FreeBSD or Linux. You can usually get them 
to back themselves up to a flash card, but this is in some binary blob that 
is difficult to examine.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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