Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / April 2005

Personal Digital Assistances (PDA) with the Palm OS running on it, from
PalmSource.com.

Manufactures of Palm base PDAs are Pa1mOne.com, Sony, Garmin GPS
devices, Kyocera, Samsung, etc...  A complete list of Palm OS licensees
can be found at: <http://www.palmsource.com/partners/licensee.html>.

For a concrete example, the Palm Treo 600 and Treo 650 smart phones are
Palm OS based full function PDAs as well as cell phones.  One of the
first licensees of the Palm OS besides Palm itself, was Handspring (used
to one one of those).  Handspring was acquired by Pa1mOne a few years
ago.

The other side of the coin are Windows CE (Pocket PC) based PDAs, with
the strongest manufacture being HP with its iPaq line of PDAs.

There are several other PDA operating systems out there, some focused
more in the smart cell phone area, and some more on traditional PDA area.

If you go into a CompUSA or CircuitCity, they usually have several of
each kind of PDA operating system, between their PDA displays and their
smart phone displays.

There is a world of software out there for PDAs and smart phones.  One
place to just get a fell for the breath of software is
<http://palmgear.com> and <http://pocketgear.com>

                                       Bob Harris