As of today, I definitely recommend a palm over a pocket pc. Putting price issues aside, and speed issues (I'm not even starting this one again), palm simply has more functionality. I've used them both and this is coming from years of expreience. There isnt one thing, aside from playing Mp3s that the palm cant do.
It can display web pages, but not quite as well as PPC. The blazer browser comes close, but doesnt have frames support.
It can play color movies as well, using tealmovie, and the quality is a lot better than one would expect from such a weak processor, and you can encode them from any avi file (even divx!).
For those that care, theres also spreadsheets, word processors and databases by the dozen.
Pictures are handled by fireviewer, quality depends on your unit.
Then of course theres ebooks, drawing programs and a program for just about any obsuce use you could come up with.
Theres also the palmasutra =), something I'm absolutely positive the ppc doesnt have, but I cant go into that on this family oriented site.
And the palms absolute killer app for any college, maybe even high school student is four.zero. Track and schedule your grades, homework, tests everything having to do with your classes...auotmatically calculates grades based on weighting, drops etc....Until ppc can come up with an even slightly competing app (none that I know of, I'd be very interested if there was), the choice is obvious for the student. IMO the single best reason to own a palm.
I'm not going to argue that ppcs dont have superior hardware. I found it hard to give up the high res screen, sound (palm pretty much doesnt have more than a pc speaker), cf slot etc.
I'm not going to go as far as to say ppc is the future, because its a ridiculously programmed OS. Platform independent os and applications do not equal high performance. I found it ridiculous that on a 70mhz processor (and thats a low end ppc) things were actually slow. Hell, reading an ebook was a chore on that thing. How much power do you need to do that? The fault can only lie in the software.
But I will say as far as hardware goes, palm is dying. If palm can update their hardware without raping their os, or ms can make a decent os (pdas do NOT need windows for crying out loud!), I'll stick with my palm iiic.
So basically it depends what you want. If youre a student, get the palm bar none. If you want functionality, get a palm. If you own a lexus, get a ppc.
Before you buy that palm, to make sure you actually like it, go try out the palm emulator. Its pretty solid, and will emulate any palm. You can install all the software you want on it, before even buying one. Can't tell you where to find one because of legal issues, but a search for "palm warez" (on altavista pref.) should point you in the right direction.
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