iphone better than PDAs?

[RG Creative Web]

Hi Everyone,

Could anyone tell which is better among PDA and iPhone and what is the main difference between the two?

Many Thanks
RG Creative Web

 

[iParis]

First of all, the iPhone is a Phone, which PDA's don't have.
And, you can get internet anywhere.

 

[steve knight]

it is more stable then a windows based pda. my palm tx was pretty stable too. not as good for working with documents and such. a pda still has that down. alarms and such are easier on a pda since things run in the background. your pretty much stuck with the default clock on the iphone.

 

[Trip.Tucker]

it is more stable then a windows based pda. my palm tx was pretty stable too. not as good for working with documents and such. a pda still has that down. alarms and such are easier on a pda since things run in the background. your pretty much stuck with the default clock on the iphone.

Alarms work for me on the iPhone and are a background process. I also work with documents. Which ones are you wanting to work with?

 

[QCassidy352]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I didn't know there were still PDAs... Didn't smartphones kill that market years ago?

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

PDAs are kind of dead. All smart phones (for the most part) are going to beat a PDA.

 

[steve knight]

Alarms work for me on the iPhone and are a background process. I also work with documents. Which ones are you wanting to work with?

only the built in alarm. I had a cool app on my pda called bug me. you wrote on the screen to make a note then you could set a reminder to have an alarm to go off. it would work even when the unit was locked. there were lots of apps that would do that. no go on the iphone. if you want to use another alarm app it has to be running and you can't lock your iphone. pretty much useless.
I see they do have some software but not like I had on my palm I could open and edit word and excel and access databases.
then the files would sync every time you plugged in the pda. every app has to be synced in some wacky way with the iphone. like splashid. on my pda when I plugged it in the files were synced with no effort on my part.
to do it with the iphone I have to open up both apps have wifi on the computer and on the iphone then manually sync the files.

 

[JeffTL]

The iPod Touch is about the last standalone PDA left, along with a few HPs and the like I think. They're about like a smartphone without the phone.

 

[Mr. Giver '94]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I didn't know there were still PDAs... Didn't smartphones kill that market years ago?

I was going to say.....

 

[JPIndustrie]

And, you can get internet anywhere.

I'm sorry, I absolutely hate when people say this. As if the iPhone was the very first phone to ever do anything other than take phone calls.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I'm sorry, I absolutely hate when people say this. As if the iPhone was the very first phone to ever do anything other than take phone calls.

it is the first phone to have a usable browser... Palm, RIM, Nokia, etc, none of them have come close to mobile safari.

 

[macapp]

the app alone that you can put on your iphone can make alot of difference comparing it to a PDA and you can find alot of support here or anywhere else in the internet if your having problem. im not sure with other PDA's though.

 

[steve knight]

it is the first phone to have a usable browser... Palm, RIM, Nokia, etc, none of them have come close to mobile safari.

thats for sure. every time I tried using the browser on my tx it would lock up. and when it did not it was not much.

 

[time2flyyy]

Let's just put it this way... if someone ever asks you the question:

Do you want a PDA or an iPhone?

The answer is iPhone!

 

[Theaser]

Let's just put it this way... if someone ever asks you the question:

Do you want a PDA or an iPhone?

The answer is iPhone!

Duh.

 

[kdarling]

it is the first phone to have a usable browser... Palm, RIM, Nokia, etc, none of them have come close to mobile safari.

Safari is very nice.

Still, other browsers were usable. Ever tried Netfront, Picsel or Opera? Even Minimo was coming along. And personally I think Netfront has the right idea with bookmarks being little images of the page.

A major factor is that the iPhone had a big enough screen to make it easier to use. But that's a result of the hardware.

For example, around 2000 I had a great PDA, a Jornada 720 with a CDPD data card over Verizon. It had a 640x240 screen and full Internet Explorer 4.0. It was VERY usable. More so at the time than the iPhone, simply because it had a wider screen which meant almost no sideways scrolling.

As for phones, industrial models with Windows CE have always had full Internet Explorer, from IE 4 to now IE 6. This was true for years before the iPhone was even a dream.

 

[ppc750fx]

Still, other browsers were usable. Ever tried Netfront, Picsel or Opera?

Yep. And they're pretty poor compared to the current crop of WebKit-based browsers. MobileSafari's the best of the WebKit ones out there, but Skyfire's quite good and even the built-in Symbian S60 browser holds its own (rendering speed sucks, but compatibility's great.)

As for phones, industrial models with Windows CE have always had full Internet Explorer, from IE 4 to now IE 6. This was true for years before the iPhone was even a dream.

Actually, no Windows CE device has had "full Internet Explorer". The rendering engine used in Pocket IE is very different than the one used the desktop version of Internet Explorer.

 

[kdarling]

Actually, no Windows CE device has had "full Internet Explorer". The rendering engine used in Pocket IE is very different than the one used the desktop version of Internet Explorer.

No sir, that's incorrect.

You're talking about Windows Mobile and the limited Pocket IE. (Which is now finally up to what they call Mobile "IE 6", which is really based on IE 7.)

I'm talking about Windows CE, which has always had the functional equivalent of full, regular Internet Explorer.

With the latter, you can write a very complicated full IE application that runs the same on either desktop or handheld. We've been doing it for almost a decade now, from IE4 to IE6 versions.

The only difference is naturally having to compile different ActiveX binaries (for signature controls, access via serial/USB to printers, etc) per CPU type.

 

[iParis]

I'm sorry, I absolutely hate when people say this. As if the iPhone was the very first phone to ever do anything other than take phone calls.

I never said it was the first and only. I said that's one of the differences between a PDA and an iPhone.

 

[deadsouls]

it is the first phone to have a usable browser... Palm, RIM, Nokia, etc, none of them have come close to mobile safari.

mobile safari crashes 100x more than opera ever did

 

[t0mat0]

But then you now have a choice of webkit browsers, and i'd imagine that seeing as the Touch is > .1% of all searches in a recent website article, that it's being a heck of a lot more than Opera. Think iPhone was on about .44% (roughlydrafted.com article if I recall).

 

[iParis]

mobile safari crashes 100x more than opera ever did

Maybe back before 2.0 and maybe a little at 2.1.
I have yet to see Safari crash on 2.2.1.

 

[ppc750fx]

I'm talking about Windows CE, which has always had the functional equivalent of full, regular Internet Explorer.

According to MSDN, pre-6.0 versions of Internet Explorer for Windows CE lack support for a number of features found in the desktop version.

Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows CE is based on the same Talisman engine as Internet Explorer 6.0 for Win32.

You are right to point out my conflation of Pocket IE and Internet Explorer for Windows CE -- but from what I can tell from the MSDN docs, with the exception of Internet Explorer 6 the Win32 and Windows CE versions do have some substantial differences.