"For our staff, the choice is easy...."

We've all heard the battle cries of Palm Pilot and Windows CE users over the past 4 years. Many casualties have come of this fight; Philips dropped out of the fight after developing the ground-breaking Velo and Nino PDAs, Everex had a brief spurt of product only to be squelched before launching their ultimate color palmtop. Now, for your bloodthirsty pleasure, we stage a battle like no other: the steel cage death match of operating system versus operating system. 

In this corner... Palm OS

Announcing the undefeated champion of the handheld arena: Palm Inc.'s Palm OS. This featherweight fighter operates on the simplest of processors and consumes less battery power than your average universal remote control. 

And in this corner... Pocket PC

And, announcing the undisputed underdog, Microsoft's Pocket PC (the line of devices running Windows CE v3.0). Now on it's sixth OS revision, Microsoft has been trying for years to perfect Bill Gates' "Mini-Me" operating system designed for handheld computers and soda machines. 

The rules

The fight will consist of three rounds: system features, built-in applications, and subjective opinion. The first round will focus on hardware and general OS capabilities, the second round will focus on software and the third round will be "graded" staff opinions divided in categories. To be fair and consistent, only color devices will be used in the tests. 

ROUND ONE: SYSTEM FEATURES ---->

Published: 6/1/00