MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Washington Post on how Palm forgot to wow spectators

Scott R · 10-31-2005, 11:08 AM

This review from the Washington Post was a breath of fresh air. Too often, the only negative reviews that have been printed have focused on how Palm is losing the race to WM devices by not including feature X. Here, Rob Pegoraro spends some time talking about how Palm has, despite constantly touting themselves as the masters of usability, in fact been taking steps backwards in terms of usability over the past few years. The ability to enter data is a crucial advantage that Palm devices have over cellphones and iPods, but with Graffiti 2 firmly in place and the input panel made smaller, and lots of little soft buttons nearby begging to be accidentally tapped by your stylus, the efficiency and accuracy of text input is now worse than it was on the original Pilot 1000/5000.

And simply putting a color screen on a sub-$100 device does not automatically make it a great device for photo viewing. As he points out, the screen quality is poor, and with precious little free storage space and no SD card, how many photos would you really be able to put on there, anyway?

Michael Mace announced a couple of years ago that the old-time believers of Zen were being stamped out of Palm. Their new thinking seems to be more of trying to be as good or better than the Pocket PC offerings. Focusing too much of your attention on devices with poor usability has a detrimental effect on the usability of your own products.

10-31-2005, 11:08 AM	#8
Scott R Junior Member Posts: 5 Karma: 25 Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Simsbury, CT Device: Treo 650 / Zodiac 1	This review from the Washington Post was a breath of fresh air. Too often, the only negative reviews that have been printed have focused on how Palm is losing the race to WM devices by not including feature X. Here, Rob Pegoraro spends some time talking about how Palm has, despite constantly touting themselves as the masters of usability, in fact been taking steps backwards in terms of usability over the past few years. The ability to enter data is a crucial advantage that Palm devices have over cellphones and iPods, but with Graffiti 2 firmly in place and the input panel made smaller, and lots of little soft buttons nearby begging to be accidentally tapped by your stylus, the efficiency and accuracy of text input is now worse than it was on the original Pilot 1000/5000. And simply putting a color screen on a sub-$100 device does not automatically make it a great device for photo viewing. As he points out, the screen quality is poor, and with precious little free storage space and no SD card, how many photos would you really be able to put on there, anyway? Michael Mace announced a couple of years ago that the old-time believers of Zen were being stamped out of Palm. Their new thinking seems to be more of trying to be as good or better than the Pocket PC offerings. Focusing too much of your attention on devices with poor usability has a detrimental effect on the usability of your own products.