ActiveWin: Pocket PC's For The Masses

Yesterday Dell made the announcement that they will be producing a cut price $199 Pocket PC based PDA. Although the full specs have yet to be released for the hand held, most Pocket PC based PDA’s cost far more than the $199 that Dell will be selling them for, and are usually out of reach price-wise for most of us.

While this is a good thing for the consumer, meaning that we can finally get our hands on a new nifty Pocket PC PDA, it is also pretty good news for Microsoft. Despite introducing the Pocket PC nearly 3 years ago, they have still yet to take over the PDA world from Palm’s even cheaper PDA’s. Palm have a good thing going with their much cheaper releases, they are a well known brand used by lots of businesses and they seem to carry the basic features that most people want.

The Dell based handheld will run Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system and use 300MHz and 400MHz Xscale processors from Intel Corp. The device will also include slots for Compact Flash and Secure Digital (SD) cards, more features should be announced soon, so it looks like feature wise the Dell handheld PDA will be packed with options even at the lower price.

Pocket PC’s have really been aimed squarely towards business users in the past, due mostly to their high prices  but also due to the lack of lower priced software and applications available to it, again out of the price range of most users. If some of the software out today for the Pocket PC could be lowered in price, it would clearly be yet another boost for the Pocket PC community as more users who own one will buy them and it could also attract those of us who don't have a Pocket PC yet.

At $199 most of us will now find the Pocket PC in our price range, assuming that Dell also release their Pocket PC in Europe too that is. The question should be, is it cheap enough to make some of us non-business users make the switch from a Palm or start off with a Pocket PC from scratch?

It is a hard question, without a doubt the Pocket PC is an impressive piece of hardware, most of the designs are great to look at, they are nice and slim, sturdy, the Operating System looks good and finally after the first Pocket PC releases, it runs fast. Connectivity options are also improving all the time too, e-mail works well in the PDA, while calendar, notes etc are all here.

The thing is, will you use them when you already have a PC at home? I spent well over $500 on my first Pocket PC and in the 2 years that I have had it, I have hardly used it at all, it is now out of date and there are better ones available along with far cheaper ones too. I do hope that I get the chance to try a newer model like the one coming from Dell, either in a store or for a full review as right now I still find it hard to recommend buying it to anyone other than a business user, but then again that is what they were designed for.

Keep your fingers crossed for a sub $199 Pocket PC in the near future though, and perhaps a drop in memory prices too so we can all use it for Pocket PC games and as a full scale MP3 player as that’s all mine is good for these days.

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