I live in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, PRC, where I'm studying Chinese at Zhejiang University. I've been thinking about getting a PDA and installing Plecodict for fast, convienient look-up of characters. But, I'm back in the States for a visit, and went to a electronics store to see what they had, and there were only 3 PDS for sale, Palm Pilot models. The guy working at the store said PDAs are being phased out, and Palm is one of the last companies still making them. HP has already stopped because of the integration with mobile phones, and it seems that PDAs (as seperate units) will soon be a thing of the past. Plecodict seems very handy, but I don't want to get stuck with a PDA that is discontiued, whose operating system won't be upgraded, and therefore has no support and bug fixes offered. Does anyone have any more information about what will be replacing PDAs? Will the fully integrated PDA/phone units be running the same firmware/OS? If not, will a complete overhaul of Plecodict be made so that it works with the next thing that will be replacing the PDA?
PDAs on their way out
- Thread starter lilongyue
- Start date
Never believe the guys in American computer stores. They just make it up as they go along, HP in the US, HTC in China? Taiwan, and several other manufacturers are still going strong. HP recently released a bunch of new PDAs, including one they're aiming at the Enterprise (meaning large corporations). I just bought an HP 211 and am ecstatic with it--four-inch VGA screen; two expansion slots (one CF and one SDHC); etc. (The two expansion cards are necessary because the SD card casn hold all of the programs you installed and the CF card can hold PlecoDict.) The 211 may be too pricy for you, but both HP and HTC have lower priced models. And just to be clear, these are pocket PCs--that is, they run on Windows Mobile, no the Palm OS.
Also, Palm is supposedly coming out with their new Linux-based Palms in April, I believe.
Hope this helps,
Sandra
Also, Palm is supposedly coming out with their new Linux-based Palms in April, I believe.
Hope this helps,
Sandra
PDAs are basically being replaced by PDAs with cell phone capabilities - the operating systems are by and large the same, so there's not really a major rewrite/reinvention of Pleco needed, the Palm OS running on Treos is a bit newer than the one our software ran on back in 2001 but the basic interfaces are the same. There are some new operating systems to deal with, iPhone and Symbian (actually not new but newly-popular) being the two most interesting, but that's more a matter of porting the software to them than of writing it over from scratch.
But yes, there are still some PDAs available - those new HP 110/210 models should be available in a lot of places soon, Palm probably is going to launch at least a minor refresh of their traditional PDA line this year and actually the iPod Touch fits most people's definition of a PDA (albeit a very multimedia-capable one).
The Linux-based Palms probably won't be out until early '09, though, at least that's what I've heard. And they can supposedly run older Palm OS software anyway, so assuming the current Palm version of Pleco works on them it's doubtful we'd rewrite it to take better advantage of them unless Palm's market share saw a dramatic improvement.
But yes, there are still some PDAs available - those new HP 110/210 models should be available in a lot of places soon, Palm probably is going to launch at least a minor refresh of their traditional PDA line this year and actually the iPod Touch fits most people's definition of a PDA (albeit a very multimedia-capable one).
The Linux-based Palms probably won't be out until early '09, though, at least that's what I've heard. And they can supposedly run older Palm OS software anyway, so assuming the current Palm version of Pleco works on them it's doubtful we'd rewrite it to take better advantage of them unless Palm's market share saw a dramatic improvement.