Bjorn Tipling

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer company, sells a lot of interesting products. In the hand-held category, however, I’ve only find expensive garbage. Anything that doesn’t have on-board persistent storage measured in gigabits can’t really be worth hundreds of dollars, can it? HP isn’t the only company peddling what I think is junk, Palm and many other notable brands are suspect. Some have as little as 70MB of persistent storage! Images and other media will not have the room they need. Whatever cool interface and/or colorful operating system your handheld may be using, that little space will leave you painfully constrained. It may be fine for your needs, but at that price? Let’s just compare the price and storage space of four products (click the links on each for full specs):

HP iPaqStorage: 256 MB total memory (192 MB ROM 64 MB RAM); up to 192 MB user available persistent storage memory
Price: $399.99  Palm T|XStorage:
128MB w/ 100MB accessible to user
Price: $299

Apple Ipod TouchStorage:8GB/16GB Price:$299/$399  Nokia N95Storage:8GB Price:~$599  The Nokia is a little on the steep end (but there’s so much more than just that roomy space). Notice that the two products with gigabytes of space are not traditional handhelds, they’re not even sold as such but they excel at meeting those same needs. I don’t see why HP would think anyone should pay the kind of money they’re asking for the iPaq. This 70MB, 128MB thing just doesn’t cut it anymore. Consumers are (hopefully) smarter than this.