Competition between Palm and HP has been kicked up a notch with the release of benchmarks from Palm, showing that the Palm Tungsten T and C handhelds equalling or outperforming HP Pocket PC devices in key tests.Surprisingly, Palm's statement includes a claim that its handhelds are better at handling Microsoft Office documents than HP's iPaqs. Pocket PC-based devices such as the iPaq, which boast a scaled-down version of Windows used on desktop PCs, have been assumed to be superior at handling PC documents.
Less surprisingly, the Palm handhelds beat the iPaqs in battery life. Palms have traditionally been superior in this area, thanks to differences in power-hungry components such as processors and displays.
The tests, paid for by Palm, compared battery life, time to data loss after handheld power failure, wireless download speed, storage efficiency, and document handling for the Palm Tungsten T handheld, the Palm Tungsten C handheld, the HP iPaq h1910 and the HP iPaq h5450.
Independent testing labs VeriTest ran the series of benchmarks.
"The proof of Palm's competitiveness is in the direct product-to-product comparisons issued today," said Sharon Ee, Palm's regional marketing director for Asia Pacific.
In battery tests, the Tungsten C handheld posted the highest battery-life scores, including slightly more than eight hours of run-time at full screen brightness.
However, it must be noted that the Tungstens have smaller displays compared with the iPaqs.
The Tungsten C handheld lasted one hour and 35 minutes longer than the HP iPaq h5450 in 802.11b wireless battery-life tests.
Palm includes the claim that its platform is better at handling MS Office documents, although this was not among the series of tests conducted by Veritest. Palm referred to earlier tests, without specifying details.
"Palm handhelds with DataViz Documents To Go performed far better than the built-in software in Pocket PC devices for handling Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents," according to Palm.
Documents To Go is software the performs translation and synchronisation for desktop documents.
"Use of Microsoft's PocketWord and PocketExcel for the Pocket PC platform can result in lost fonts, degradation of image resolution and lost headers, tables, and charts," said the Palm statement.
In a test that measures how long data is retained if the main batteries are almost dead, causing the devices to go into standby, "the Palm handhelds maintained user data for significantly longer than the iPaq devices...The Tungsten T handheld lasted for 21 days, five times longer than the HP iPaq h5450, which lasted only four days, in a time to data loss test," said the statement.
The wireless download speed test showed that the Tungsten C handheld was more than twice as fast as the HP iPaq h5450 in a web page download test, loading the test page in 11.69 seconds as compared to 28.02 seconds for the iPaq.
Finally, in the storage efficiency test, the storage of a set of contacts, appointments and documents showed both platforms to be roughly equal.
The tests, however, don't tell the full story, according to earlier reports. 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. Scores in other areas, such as video-rendering speed and processor performance, were not measured.
The results are welcome news for Palm in Asia-Pacific and shows that its hardware In the first quarter of this year, Hewlett-Packard ousted Palm Inc as the number one handheld maker in Asia-Pacific market share, according to IT market analysts Gartner.
HP commanded 16.2 percent of the handheld market in the first quarter of this year, compared with Palm's 13 percent. This is a reverse of the same period in 2002, when HP and Palm had 9.9 percent and 15.5 percent market share respectively.
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