Picking a Pocket

By Chris Taylor

When I got hold of one of Microsoft's new Pocket PCs, set for release this week, my first concern was for my coat pockets. The poor things get thoroughly frayed with all the portable equipment I jam into them every morning: CD player, Palm Pilot, e-mail pager, voice recorder, a novel for the train. Pocket PC promises to do the work of all of the above in a single 9-oz. shell (made variously by Compaq, H-P and Casio). Given that my local tailor charges me the equivalent of the national debt of a small country for sewing up all the holes in my clothing created by this gadgetry, how could I resist?

Indeed, the all-in-one functionality of the Pocket PC is enough to make you drop to your knees and thank heaven for the 21st century. Surfing the Web with text and full-color photos was a joy. Reading and sending e-mail--even with nettlesome attachments--was a snap. Plugging in headphones and listening to MP3 music files while playing solitaire made my morning commute fly by.

It was also pretty cool to record my verbal ramblings as .wav files, which could be uploaded later to my PC. And I was thoroughly impressed with the first appearance of Microsoft's Clear Type technology, which lets you read downloaded books in a font as crisp as any on a printed page. (Because of copyright hassles, most Clear Type books won't arrive until the end of the year. In the meantime, feast your eyes on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, which are provided free with your machine, courtesy of Microsoft.)

All this would have been very persuasive had I not grown so fiercely loyal to the sleek little Palm V that I bought a few months ago to replace a lost and lamented Filofax organizer. To win me over completely--not to mention the millions of Palm enthusiasts who dominate the handheld market--Pocket PC would have to be easier to understand and simpler to operate than a Palm, especially when doing boring workaday stuff like entering lunch dates and addresses and jotting down memos.

No device based on the Windows CE operating system has yet managed to be this simple, and unfortunately the Pocket PC turns out to be no exception. Microsoft's idea of making the system more intuitive seems to be limited to moving the "Start" menu from the lower-left corner of the screen to the upper left and adding an almost invisible button marked OK in the top right, which you need to tap all the time but invariably forget. Too often I was more conscious of operating the system than concentrating on the task at hand.

I also found Pocket PC's handwriting-recognition skills to be woefully inadequate. It kept reading my a's as g's or u's, my b's as d's and sprinkling periods liberally throughout my text. A few hours of this, and my head was throbbing; I reverted to tapping in my letters one at a time on the onscreen keyboard. For the time being, I'll stick with Palm's tried-and-tested Graffiti alphabet.

So should you buy a Pocket PC? Sure--but only if you plan on doing most of your data entry on a PC, then transferring the files to the handheld device. And only if you think the bells and whistles, fabulous as they are, are worth about $170 more than what you'll pay for the Palm V (street price: $329). Of course, if you're like me, you may be saving the difference in tailor bills.

For more on what the Pocket PC can do, go to microsoft.com/pocketpc Tech questions for Chris? E-mail him at cdt@well.com