Finally, a “Smart-PDA” from Apple?

It looks like Apple might be finally entering the PDA market! This is a good thing since Palm OS 6 doesn’t plan to support the Macintosh.

The odd part of this is that even though Macintosh has a small percentage of the computer market, many of the Palm OS people that I know are Mac-users. The question to me is what percentage of their sales go to Mac-users? The only reason I put Windows back into my house after 20 years was to get better synchronization with my Macintosh. I wanted some of the geekier conduits and they just didn’t exist for the Mac. Some third party company (the Missing-sync folks) will write a Mac-driver if the market is there…

But I digress:
It’ll probably have a hard drive (ala mini-iPod) and Firewire, USB and BlueTooth. The second article mentions WiFi and cell phone. There were hints of it playing music (actually downloading music while in the waiting room). Of course it’ll support QuickTime and sync with all of the iApps. And (wait for it…) it’ll support Windows. Maybe not the first week, but soon. You can’t tell me that all the Windows people who bought iPods (and considered iPods) won’t at least consider this device. I’m assuming it’s share files in a variety of ways (like target disk mode and such). The only thing I haven’t seen mentioned is a camera and GPS. I’d subscribe to .mac I think if this tied into it…

One of the articles I read said something like ‘people spend more time deciding on a phone or a PDA than any other electronic device’. I know I do, if I’m going to carry it everywhere, I’m going to be fussy about it. My 2 cents: No mini-keyboard/thumbboard. Let me use grafitti or something similar. Let it support a regular USB keyboard (or mouse) thought the USB port (or via WiFi?)

You can check out this article from MacNet2.com and part 2.

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