Take your Office files with you
Winner: Draw   |
On the surface, Pocket PC would appear to have the edge when it comes to Microsoft Office compatibility. After all, Microsoft built the Windows Mobile OS and outfitted it with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. But these apps are mere wisps of their desktop counterparts, and files lose their formatting when copied between PDA and PC. In addition, you have to drag a file into the Sync folder yourself for it to automatically update every time you work on your PC.
While the Palm OS offers no out-of-box support for Office files, many of the latest models, such as the Tungsten E, come bundled with a compelling third-party solution. DataViz's Documents To Go enables you to view and edit desktop documents on your PDA without converting them first to a PDA-specific format, and the latest version offers native support for Word and Excel. You also can view Word and Excel documents received as e-mail attachments--a major plus for wireless-PDA users. Best of all, Documents To Go provides seamless synchronisation between Palm OS and Windows, so any changes are updated automatically, which is the way it should be.
Still, because Palm OS doesn't provide additional support for Office files with all of its models (Documents To Go Standard Edition costs US$29.95 as a standalone application), there's no clear winner here.
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Try managing many files in a Palm - the concept of directory structure or file management doesn't even exist on Palms (it may on the latest OS, but by then I'd moved to Windows)
How about having your review cover eBooks and readers - almost a raison d'etre for a PDA?
Put 800 eBooks into a SD memory unit, and see whether Palm or PocketPC copes best. It isn't even a contest.
That's 2 areas Pocket PC wins in - still sure Palms are better?