Palm beats iPaq hands down, says a report from VeriTest. Problem is, the study was commissioned by Palm. Dare we believe it?Last week, Palm attempted to answer this question by pitting its line of handhelds against fierce rival HP's iPaq series.
The handheld market leader released a report commissioned from hardware and software tester VeriTest. The latter took four handhelds--Palm Tungsten C, Palm Tungsten T, HP iPaq H1910 and the HP iPaq H5450 together--and put them through a variety of tests. Here's what VeriTest found.
VeriTest ran a few battery benchmarks on the four handhelds. On most counts, Palm's Tungsten C came up trumps. A part of this was attributed to the Tungsten C's larger-capacity battery, but even with that considered, the C proved quite exemplary in this area.
For example, with screen brightness set at 100 percent, the Tungsten C scored 8 hours 9 minutes, compared to the meager 2 hours 27 minutes that the iPaq H5450 managed.
At the same time, VeriTest also tested the storage efficiency of the different PDAs. They asked questions like: How much space does a 237kb Word document occupy on the various handhelds?
Again, the Palm handhelds finished on top. The Tungsten C used only 111 kilobytes whereas both the iPaq H1910 and iPaq H5450 deployed 193 kilobytes for storing the file.
Finally, VeriTest measured the download speeds of the Wi-Fi enabled Tungsten C and iPaq H5450. Using the same access point and loading the same page, it found that the Tungsten C provided twice the speed of the iPaq H5450. The iPaq was once again trounced.
One criticism of the tests was oversimplification, which is sometimes--but not always--unavoidable. For example, the iPaq H5450 has a larger display, so it naturally consumes more power. That's something VeriTest's battery benchmarks do not tell readers.
We were also surprised that VeriTest measured the download speeds of just one site--CNN.com. There have been suggestions that the Tungsten C's new Web browser is selective when it comes to rendering HTML pages. Some sites don't load up quite as nicely as others. Testing the handhelds with different sites would surely have made a more complete case.
Perhaps the main issue we had with the test was VeriTest's selection of benchmarks. The company stated: "Palm, Inc. devices equaled or outperformed the HP devices in all tests." In fairness, the set of tests was rather limited. Battery life and storage efficiency are both strengths of the Palm OS. There were scores of other comparison areas, such as video-rendering speed and processor performance, which were not measured.
That said, the results reveal that Palm is interested in quickly catching up with Pocket PC devices. Just a year ago, it wouldn't have been conceivable for a Palm device to match the iPaq in terms of features and performance, let alone, according to one report at least, convincingly beat the latter.
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