Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: I Want a Jupiter, Damnit! 9
Okay, so I was off at a friend's place yesterday morning feeling very relaxed and I finally admitted to myself why I no longer carry a PDA. After all, at this point I'm juggling appointments for myself and six other people with five clients and around ten other projects. Keeping it all in my mind, even with my cryptic little written notes in my oh-so-hip notepad is getting really obviously self-indulgent since I'm simply not pulling it off anymore.
What it really comes down to is that I'm sullenly refusing to buy a PDA as long as they won't sell me what I want.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ALL OF THE CLAMSHELL DEVICES!!!!!
Almost ten fucking years ago I could buy Jornadas, Sharps, LGs, Casios, and a dozen other mainstream devices with decent-sized, vertically-oriented screens, positive action keyboards big enough (kinda) to really type on, connections for external devices, and battery lives measured in hours of active use and built around easily replacable stuff like AAA batteries.
Plenty of people I dealt with, from ad sales reps to doctors, loved them. HP was (at the time) quite proud of them and they regularly sold out. Psion built an entire company out of them. And suddenly they all went away. (Yeah, Psion still exists, but in the US, for all practical purposes, they might as well be Amiga.) The rare times I see somebody with a working clamshell these days it's a closely guarded treasure and several people have admitted to having bought used spares just to be sure of replacement parts.
Now, since these devices faded out while I was in a position to be made much of by corporate sales types, I got the chance to ask around and I was told by folks from every fuckin' manufacturer that these devices were:
A.) Well-liked by the engineers and easy to support
B.) Used relatively standard components except for motherboards and cases, fabs for both of which had long since paid themselves off
C.) Were profitable both per unit and as a company division
D.) Were achieving gradually but steadily increasing penetration in several highly desirable vertical markets, including doctors, on-site engineers, and the sorts of insurance/real estate sales that leads to multi-hundred-unit corporate purchases.
E.) Other then the first appalling release of WinCE (no, really?) were no more or less stable then their laptop and desktop counterparts
F.) Did just fine with simpler MS-format documents and surprisingly well with audio and email
and
G.) Had no substitution effect worth a damn with typical Palm device form factor devices. (In other words, especially for vertical market applications, replacing a clamshell with, say, a Visor made for very unhappy users.)
So we have here a product that is mature, profitable, getting a growing set of applications, ever more loyal buyers who are unlikely to bolt to some other product, and development costs that have paid off just fine.
So why the hell did they discontinue them?
If our ever-so-perfect capitalist system is working so well, then why can't I buy these for eighty bucks by now?
I can certainly hie me down to Chinatown and find plenty of devices using the same hardware for forty or fifty bucks. I have my choice of translators, scientific calculators, and concordances that use improved versions of the keyboards and screens I remember so fondly.
The silicon from the most low-end Palm OS device out there would handle the processing chores just fine.
Palm OS 3.0 provides all the OS needs and even has hooks for vertical screen alignment, larger screens, and more full-function keyboards.
So what's the deal?
I have now come to a time in my life when my days are constantly dependent to a mission-critical-degree on my ability to track contact information, schedules, and small databases, each of which change daily and would require far more typing to do right then I intend to do with a stylus.
Basically, a nice Palm OS device, or even something else (even with a Micro$lime OS, bleagh!) with a decent Mac OS client, would easily make me a hundred dollars more a month. Bare minimum.
And from my IT days I'm well aware that I'm not the only one in this situation.
Wanna tell me that I should just get a Palm with some dinky add-on keyboard? That something either the size of my thumb or nine inches across is just as good as a well-made, stable four-inch wide keyboard built to fit in my hand? I think not.
There just isn't anything worth a damn out there. The closest I could get would be to buy one of the now semi-orphaned Psions and yet again have to learn a marginalized OS, use flaky client software, and deal with a company that has pretty much written off the U.S. market.
The Sony PEG-UX50 Clie sucks. (Hey, my old Timex-Sinclair had a better keyboard.) The Nokia 9290 and its cousins have wimpy little screens. (The 9210 doesn't even work in the US.) The Danger hiptop is a step in the right direction but is three times too small. I'm not even going to talk about the Zaurus or Tungsten or other Palm form-factor devices.
I've just gone online to see if maybe I'm just out of date. Ya know what I found? An article from late 2001 saying that HP was phasing out their clamshell line and an article from June of 2002 saying "The clamshell form factor remains highly popular, particularly among corporate users, with HP the clear leader in the Windows-powered clamshell market.".
Go for it. Explain to me why this is rational decisionmaking.
So, you folks tell me. Other then buying a used and orphaned unit like a Jornada 728 and cobbling together a Mac OS solution from a dozen parts from half a dozen places, what exactly are my options?
Rustin
What it really comes down to is that I'm sullenly refusing to buy a PDA as long as they won't sell me what I want.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ALL OF THE CLAMSHELL DEVICES!!!!!
Almost ten fucking years ago I could buy Jornadas, Sharps, LGs, Casios, and a dozen other mainstream devices with decent-sized, vertically-oriented screens, positive action keyboards big enough (kinda) to really type on, connections for external devices, and battery lives measured in hours of active use and built around easily replacable stuff like AAA batteries.
Plenty of people I dealt with, from ad sales reps to doctors, loved them. HP was (at the time) quite proud of them and they regularly sold out. Psion built an entire company out of them. And suddenly they all went away. (Yeah, Psion still exists, but in the US, for all practical purposes, they might as well be Amiga.) The rare times I see somebody with a working clamshell these days it's a closely guarded treasure and several people have admitted to having bought used spares just to be sure of replacement parts.
Now, since these devices faded out while I was in a position to be made much of by corporate sales types, I got the chance to ask around and I was told by folks from every fuckin' manufacturer that these devices were:
A.) Well-liked by the engineers and easy to support
B.) Used relatively standard components except for motherboards and cases, fabs for both of which had long since paid themselves off
C.) Were profitable both per unit and as a company division
D.) Were achieving gradually but steadily increasing penetration in several highly desirable vertical markets, including doctors, on-site engineers, and the sorts of insurance/real estate sales that leads to multi-hundred-unit corporate purchases.
E.) Other then the first appalling release of WinCE (no, really?) were no more or less stable then their laptop and desktop counterparts
F.) Did just fine with simpler MS-format documents and surprisingly well with audio and email
and
G.) Had no substitution effect worth a damn with typical Palm device form factor devices. (In other words, especially for vertical market applications, replacing a clamshell with, say, a Visor made for very unhappy users.)
So we have here a product that is mature, profitable, getting a growing set of applications, ever more loyal buyers who are unlikely to bolt to some other product, and development costs that have paid off just fine.
So why the hell did they discontinue them?
If our ever-so-perfect capitalist system is working so well, then why can't I buy these for eighty bucks by now?
I can certainly hie me down to Chinatown and find plenty of devices using the same hardware for forty or fifty bucks. I have my choice of translators, scientific calculators, and concordances that use improved versions of the keyboards and screens I remember so fondly.
The silicon from the most low-end Palm OS device out there would handle the processing chores just fine.
Palm OS 3.0 provides all the OS needs and even has hooks for vertical screen alignment, larger screens, and more full-function keyboards.
So what's the deal?
I have now come to a time in my life when my days are constantly dependent to a mission-critical-degree on my ability to track contact information, schedules, and small databases, each of which change daily and would require far more typing to do right then I intend to do with a stylus.
Basically, a nice Palm OS device, or even something else (even with a Micro$lime OS, bleagh!) with a decent Mac OS client, would easily make me a hundred dollars more a month. Bare minimum.
And from my IT days I'm well aware that I'm not the only one in this situation.
Wanna tell me that I should just get a Palm with some dinky add-on keyboard? That something either the size of my thumb or nine inches across is just as good as a well-made, stable four-inch wide keyboard built to fit in my hand? I think not.
There just isn't anything worth a damn out there. The closest I could get would be to buy one of the now semi-orphaned Psions and yet again have to learn a marginalized OS, use flaky client software, and deal with a company that has pretty much written off the U.S. market.
The Sony PEG-UX50 Clie sucks. (Hey, my old Timex-Sinclair had a better keyboard.) The Nokia 9290 and its cousins have wimpy little screens. (The 9210 doesn't even work in the US.) The Danger hiptop is a step in the right direction but is three times too small. I'm not even going to talk about the Zaurus or Tungsten or other Palm form-factor devices.
I've just gone online to see if maybe I'm just out of date. Ya know what I found? An article from late 2001 saying that HP was phasing out their clamshell line and an article from June of 2002 saying "The clamshell form factor remains highly popular, particularly among corporate users, with HP the clear leader in the Windows-powered clamshell market.".
Go for it. Explain to me why this is rational decisionmaking.
So, you folks tell me. Other then buying a used and orphaned unit like a Jornada 728 and cobbling together a Mac OS solution from a dozen parts from half a dozen places, what exactly are my options?
Rustin
Repeated History (Score:2)
So what did HP do? Cut in 1/2 the development cycle for the next line of printers. Then they cut it in
HP decisions (Score:2)
Would I trade it for an 8150? Probably.
The impression I get is that what has happened in the printer arena is more that among SOHO-level devices, pretty much everybody now makes shite but for workgroup-level stuff like my hundred-plus pound darling, quality is still good for some vendors.
Any product that has to sell to the kind of ignoramuses who would buy a
Re:HP decisions (Score:2)
HP generally treats all corporate
Looking at the Tapwave (Score:2)
By the way, I really am hoping that I'm missing something here. Much though I love ranting, I would far rather have one of you check in here with "But surely you know about the . . .
shoot (Score:1)
That's what I'd like, please.
can't help you (Score:2)
Random thought: electronics manufacturers do tend to prefer to eliminate moving parts wherever possible
sorry buck... (Score:2)
This thing [compusa.com] is selling for $20 after madd rebates. As long as you can actually sit down or write on a solid surface you can draw in your notes (either to a palm/pocket pc device through IrDa, or a laptop,IrDa or USB) then maybe OCR the jpgs/pngs/bitmaps? or review by hand and re-type?
Although for that matter, you
Check out the Palm Tungsten C (Score:2)
It's also the most feature rich palm to date with a 400 mHz processor and 64mb of RAM. Oh and built in WI-FI. Also like all new palms it has the "Palm Universal Connector" so you can connect a bunch of different stuff t
Along the same lines (Score:2)
Those things rocked. They were a full blown x86 laptop that could fold up and fit in a suit pocket. Sadly Toshiba decided to discontinue them around the same time other vendors like HP and NEC eliminated their clamshells.
People I know who own one are as fanatical as the clamshell users you know.
My suspicion is there was some stupid widely circulated market research report from around that time saying consumers wanted either Palm like devices or full-si