Ken’s full retort to my previous claim
Ken took the time to call me out and say I was wrong when I said he prefers his Treo. Thanks for correcting me, but my argument still stands, and you even support it, that there are just some things the Treo does better than anything S60 can.
The Palm PIM software has long been held up as the leader in the PDA world, and rightly so. It offers ease of use and funtionality that’s unparalled on any other PDA or smartphone. I’d tried WinCE mobiles along the way, but they were crude and disappointing. But Palm has failed in many ways to leverage their strengths.
So yes Palm has and is currently failing, but I don’t want to see their PIM die. I’ve fallen in love with it, and I’ve owned 3 devices running various versions of the Palm OS.
Integrating [Ken’s talking about Nokia] the basic Outlook PIM functionality led to easy synching of contacts, calendar, to do tasks and notes.
This is where we have differing opinions. You still live in the PC centric world, while I and a lot of mobile phone users don’t. Syncing to Outlook … do you know how much Outlook costs? Do you know that Microsoft Office is probably the most pirated piece of software? For a lot of people the only PIM they’ll use is on their mobile phone. The Palm has a beautiful PIM that can stand alone without the need to be tied down to a PC. It is feature rich and drop dead easy to use. The PIM built into Nokia phones may be basic enough that it syncs well with Outlook, but frankly there are a lot of people who will never even connect their phone to their PC to reap such benefits.
So to fairly respond to Stefan, yes, I’m still wedded to me Treo, but that’s a habit I can see breaking. In my real world, the N80i will quickly become my primary mobile device, with some add-on software and a bluetooth keyboard. The Treo, will still be at my side, but I’ll switch from infrared keyboard to bluetooth on it so I only need one keyboard. The two devices are on different carriers, so I expect that I’ll "upgrade" to carrying two devices for business needs. But the Treo will take a back seat and slowly fade from memory. It’s a device that’s lived it’s lifetime and is quickly becoming a dinosaur.
Innovate or die, I agree, Palm failed to do this. Microsoft’s mobile operating system is running circles around them, not to mention device manufactures are throwing a bevy of technology into their products that Palm has always been slow to adopt (Treo with WiFi … where are you?)
I admit, I was wrong, you don’t prefer your Treo, but it still is going to be a device you carry with you.
There’s still one big advantage to the Treo – email. The Treo supports multiple email addresses very easily, and I use that feature. I use it, but I don’t know that I need it. Adjusting the way I deal with email will take a little time, but seems easily accomplished.
What I’m trying to encourage, is that Nokia needs to realize that these devices need to stand on their own before they can be called mobile computers. Yes I agree Palm has made some mistakes and is paying the price for it now, but we can both agree that what they have done right has yet to be cloned by either Microsoft or Nokia.
Just because the Palm OS may be loosing market share doesn’t mean we should ignore its best features. While the Nokia N80i you covet may be a better device over all, you’re still making sacrifices with it. Palm has something brilliant on its hands and I want to learn from it to further improve S60.
As I was typing this I see Ken answered a question I posted in the comments section on his blog posts. I simply asked: "What about the Palm PIM?" He replies:
I know a lot of people use the PIM phone alone. I couldn’t I’m too spread across devices. If I didn’t synch it to my PC a PIM on any handheld would be utterly useless to me.
The N-series PIM is usefull, but rudimentary. Input via the dialpad is cumbersome, even painful. But the calendar integration with Outlooks is key in business I think. I have found that I use the PIM on the Treo to schedule appointments and such. I create entries on the Treo that I can’t or never would on the N-series phones. I view the PIM as a synch-only feature myself.
The Palm PIM is far superior to any I’ve seen elsewhere, but I drank the Outlook kool-aid with Outlook 2003. That’s when I backed away from the Palm PIM and focused on Outlook interoperability (now built in with current Palm OS).
There’s an untapped market that I don’t have a good sense of here. Business users are very Outlook driven. GenX, GenY, students, and more are more mobile only users than I. They define a new working model that I haven’t fully adjusted to myself. I amy be too ingrained in old styles to ever adapt to some of the work styles that are useful to others.
Not sure I answered your question, Stefan.
Ken you’ve answered my question perfectly, you’ve proven that you just don’t have the same usage habits as me and my peers. Business users may be important, but the rest of us greatly out number you. Which is why I want Nokia to get off their ass already and finish implenting Python and Apache onto their mobile phones. In 2007 we live in a world of AJAX rich sites, there should be no reason why I can’t go to a website and have something as rich as Outlook provided to me. Just look at Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Zimbra, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, these are full blow applications embedded into a website. I dislike the term sync, I just want to work on my data, regardless of where it is, period. I should never have to hit the sync button. I’ve written this rant twice, and I’ll be echoing it over and over again until it happens:
- I’m convinced that thanks to Python for S60v3 my idea is possible
- My laptop is the center of my life, time for my phone to take that position
People don’t want to install applications on their computer to manage their data, then install another application to sync their data, they just want to work on their data. Outlook may be proper for you, but for people like me who have moved our workflow from offline to online it’s ancient technology.