tienshiao.org

I played with a Tungsten C today at CompUSA. They had an access point nearby, and the Tungsten was able to pick it up no problem. I was up and surfing the web in no time. The screen is nice, bright, and clear. I had no problems using the thumbboard. It felt fairly sturdy. But, there were a couple of things I didn’t like. It was too big — too thick, too wide to fit in my pocket like a cell phone or to carry anywhere else. It was too small — despite having a relatively high-res display (320×320), there was WAY too much horizontal scrolling. I could make do if I had to, but it wouldn’t be something I would want to do. A different browser would probably have helped. The browser was also a little unresponsive when downloading from a site, but that’s probably an OS limitation (previous versions of the PalmOS were strictly single threaded, they’re slowing migrating).

Of course, I got to thinking about the Treo 600. The Treo 600 will obviously be smaller, so easier to tote. But that would also mean even more horizontal scrolling. Ack. No… I still believe my idea is still best.

Now the WiFI part. It was certainly cool. As I was playing with it, I could just imagine myself being in the middle of nowhere, whipping it out, and looking something up on the internet at broadband speeds. Ahhh.. ubiquitous wireless broadband.

Except that’s not here yet. I’m just guessing but WiFi probably covers 1% of the square foot space that I ever visit. So really WiFi isn’t going to cut it. Yeah, sure I could use it in my living room, but I’d much rather use a laptop in that case. So, we’re left waiting for the 3G networks and beyond. Sprint’s speeds are probably getting there (I’m guessing). Especially since tests have shown that the Tungsten C’s WiFi throughput is not exactly something to write home about. But latency needs to be worked on. I’ve never tried Sprint’s Vision, but I know with Cingular’s GPRS, and Nextel’s IDEN, network interaction was not very responsive. Oh well, someday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2003 at 1:28 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.