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| The Palm OS is older and marketed earlier than WM and this has initially resulted in more people adapted to Palm as they were the pioneers of PDA devices and consequently third party software developers created their programs to fit into the Palm OS. Therefore in the early years of this decade most of health care professionals carried Palm devices. But later on Microsoft jumped into the field and more and more devices were manufactured and ultimately they gained an equal share of the market by 2006 and later. Many pediatric and medical programs were only available for Palm OS and so people were reluctant when it comes to WM devices. But this has changed tremendously now that everyone creates two versions of their commercial product one for the Palm and one for the Pocket PC. In fact there are new vendors such as Diagnosispro and UpToDate initially created software that is compatible only for the WM OS, however there are still some who only provides software for the Palm OS such as Kidometer and Bilitool. The Palm OS is a symbol of simplicity where fonts are large and colors are eyes comfortable and navigation is brilliantly user friendly and with few taps you get what you want. This simplicity added some extra advantages over Pocket PC such as better battery life and less memory requirement and hence lower prices. But is not very powerful in terms of added features such as internet connection or Bluetooth or complex mathematical calculations. On the other hand Pocket PC is a bit more complicated but much more colorful with higher graphics appeal and is a power house with fully fledged features that stretches from wireless connections to 3G technology and is very versatile in that you can pretty much do everything with it that a PDA can do. I think by now you started to get the point .. yes I love the Windows Mobile OS and I prefer it over the Palm OS. |
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| There are other OS'es developed by other companies like RIM from Blackberry, iPhone from Apple, and Symbian by Nokia, Samsung and others. These OS'es initially did not share a lot of the PDA market specially in the medical field but they started to get some momentum. For example check Skyscape for Symbian and iPhone compatible programs and PDAmedisoft for Blackberry compatible programs. One of the big problems that was seen with the iPhone is that it is a locked device and you can't actually install medical programs on it and Skyscape and Epocrates were able to make their products available for the iPhone only via web based applications which can be accessed via wireless connection of the device, But now that has changed and Apple finally unlocked the iPhone read this post and check out the list of available medical iphone applications. So we are left with Palm and Windows Mobile as the two major OS'es used by physicians and pediatricians around the world (participate in this poll to see peds percentages). |
More reasons why I prefer Windows Mobile.
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| The operating system (commonly shortened OS) is the software that runs the PDA or any computer and that usually comes built-in with the device. This is different from the hardware (the device) which is the equipment that utilizes that OS. For best devices for your pediatric needs read this guide. Essentially there are two main OS'es for PDA devices, these are Palm and Windows Mobile (AKA Pocket PC read this blog post for detailed nomenclature). Palm is created by Palm Inc. and WM is created by Microsoft Inc. Devices that uses the Palm usually manufactured by the same company so these devices are called Palm (just like Apple they manufacture the Mac computers and the Mac OS), and there are many versions such as Palm Tungsten or Palm TX. While Microsoft does not manufacture devices it provides the OS for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to use it on their devices, examples of such OEMs are HTC, HP, Dell, iMate, and others (Just like the PCs where Windows is provided by Microsoft but the computer is manufactured by Dell, Toshiba, HP, and others). |
| Here comes the big question, which is better Palm or Windows Mobile? |
Lastly There are two caveats
- If you are surrounded by Palm users who refuse to switch then perhaps its better not to swim against the
wave and go for the Palm so you can share experiences and troubleshoot with them in case of problems. - Whenever there is a new version of the OS (frequently called ROM upgrade) don't rush and install it, wait for a
while until medical program developers get their products compatible with the new version of the OS. Likewise
do not go for an old OS as programs may not be compatible either.
If you are interested in further details and want to know more about the differences between Palm and Pocket PC
read this guide for further detailed comparison.
read this guide for further detailed comparison.
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