Which Palm should I buy?

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

I need good handwritting software and surface area to write notes.
I need ability to read and input Excel files, preferably vertially and horizontally.
Great battery life.
Don't want to spend much. WIll look used on eBay, probably.
Can be a couple years old, or a different type besides Palm, like HAndspring.

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

David Kilo wrote:
> I need good handwritting software and surface area to write notes.

Most Palm devices are pretty much equivalent in this area. They
all give you about the same size to write in. Some models have
largers displays, however, which does make it easier to see more
of what you've written at a time. The one big exception is the
Tungsten|C, which has a built-in miniature QWERTY keyboard.
However, it's one of the most expensive models, so probably out of
your price range.

> I need ability to read and input Excel files, preferably vertially
> and horizontally.

For this, you will probably want to get a Palm device that runs
OS 5. OS 4 and earlier devices use much slower processors, so
they will probably work, but they will just not be very fast at
something that (for the Palm) is a fairly heavyweight operation,
like editing MS Office stuff.

Virtually all the devices PalmOne currently makes run OS 5, but
a lot of the used stuff you'll find on eBay runs OS 4.x or older.
By the way, if you do buy an older device, definitely buy one
that has OS 4.x and not something older like 3.5, since you'll
get better compatibility with software that's out there now.

You can get information about specific models at www.palmone.com .

> Great battery life.

Unfortunately most of the newer devices don't have as good battery
life as the older ones. So you pretty much have to choose between
good battery life and a fast machine with a nice display.

> Can be a couple years old, or a different type besides Palm, like HAndspring.

A lot of Handspring devices, like the Visors, run an older version of
the OS (3.1H1, I believe). So I would stay away from them personally.

- Logan

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

johnbartley@email.com wrote:

> On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 19:35:39 GMT, Logan Shaw <lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com>
> wrote:

>>For this, you will probably want to get a Palm device that runs
>>OS 5. OS 4 and earlier devices use much slower processors, so
>>they will probably work, but they will just not be very fast at
>>something that (for the Palm) is a fairly heavyweight operation,
>>like editing MS Office stuff.

> Bzzt! Apples and oranges. The older CPUs also did more with the same clock
> cycle, so speed comparisons are misleading.

Well, I agree 100% that you can't compare clock speeds of Dragonball
(OS 4) and ARM (OS 5) Palm systems. There are three reasons:

(1) The Dragonball (68000) is CISC, and the ARM is RISC, and typically
a single CISC instruction does more than a RISC instruction. For
example, adding some value in memory to a value in a register would
require just a single ADD instruction on 68000, but on a RISC system
it would require one instruction to load from memory and then another
to add.

(2) Despite the fact that RISC instructions do less, RISC processors
can generally do more instructions per clock cycle. This is mainly
because the instructions do less, which means they are simpler and
can be optimized better (with pipelining, for example).

(3) On the Palm, most programs are still 68000 code, which on OS 5
devices is run under emulation because an ARM processor can't
run in directly.

However, having said all that, my experience has been that the ARM
systems run stuff pretty darned fast. Even the slower ARM devices
(like the Tungsten|T -- only 144 MHz) run a LOT faster than an m505,
which is a reasonably representative OS 4 device. On one application
I've worked on, I had some very CPU-intensive code, and I found that
even before converting it to work as an ARMlet on the OS 5 devices,
the 68000 code still ran faster under emulation on the Tungsten|T
than it did as native code on the m505.

In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a case where any task ran
faster on an OS 4 device than on an OS 5, and that even includes
pure 68000 code that has to be emulated on OS 5.

- Logan