The cheapest Pocket PC device out there?

[JohnSavage]

What's the cheapest Pocket PC device out there?

Palm seem to sell for less than £100 but I assume do not run Pocket PC operating system.

And I am not talking about phones which you get for free and then pay a fortune per month on rental

[petevick]

Hi,
non-phone edition Pocket PC's are getting harder to come by.

The Dells have always seemed to offer good value, and I have used them in some applications, however, most of the work we now do involves remote comms, so we go for WM6 Professional as it is now called - a PocketPC with a phone.

It depends on your app and environment to a certain extent. Drop a Dell without a case, and you may lose it, but you would have to drop 5 to get to the cost of a ruggedised device.

Pete

[JohnSavage]

I asked the question to see what was out there; it seems to me that if your target platform is Pocket PC but a Pocket PC device costs £200 minimum then would it not may sense to spend the extra £100 and buy a laptop it is so much more capable

[petevick]

Hi,
but not nearly as portable. Where PocketPC's win out is thier very portability. We have an application that has collected well over 500,000 assets using the XDAii, including collecting photographs. We have been looking for well over a year, and have finally found a rugged device with bluetooth, wifi, GSM, GPRS a camera and storage card.

I feel the main competitor to the PPC is a tablet or similar, none of which are less than probably £1200, and still don't have a camera, and the comms capability of the PPC without spending extra. Battery life is also an issue.

Pete

[Shaggy Hiker]

Dell has stopped making PDAs as well, though they still sell 3rd party devices. The prices are not too bad for some of them, though I don't remember seeing any that are in the price range you are talking about.

The PDA market seems to be dwindling. Dell and Toshiba have bowed out, and Compaq was bought by HP. This may reflect the fact that the standard PDA is not very useful for general purposes. If you have something that it is useful for (like an inventory system, or some kinds of portable data entry), then it is VERY useful, but as a general tool, it is most useful if bundled with other things. PDA phones are becoming better and better, which makes sense, as a PDA and a phone share similar niches for most people (calendar, address book, etc.). Dell is selling several GPS equipt PDA models. That's another good use for them.

I considered a PDA phone, but decided against it because none of the models seemed to have the features I wanted with battery life that seemed even remotely reasonable. I don't want to be charging my phone daily.

[JohnSavage]

The big question then has to be has Pocket PC as a platform got a future ?

[Shaggy Hiker]

As a stand alone product it might not. On the other hand, you could ask the same question about cell phones. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a phone that doesn't have a camera, and to the best of my knowledge, there isn't one on the market that doesn't have things like calculators, calendars, and a few others bundled in with it.

PDA/GPS systems and PDA/Phone systems will probably replace the PDA only simply because there won't be a market for just a PDA.

One thing this means is that the platform itself probably does have a future, it just involves more devices rolled into one. The PDA may go away as a device, but only because it will change its name in favor of the primary functionality.