Palm OS | ||
 Palm Tungsten TX |
 Symbol SPT 1800 |
 Treo 680 Smartphone |
Pocket PC and CE.Net |
 Symbol PPT 2800 |
 Symbol PPT 8800 |
 Audiovox Thera |
 Psion Teklogix Netpad 3500 |
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We were working with Apple's Newton platform when the PalmPilot was released by USRobotics (and subsequently purchased by 3Com, then Palm setup as a separate company). The Palm product has proved to be the most successful computer ever made, with sales well in excess of any previous "system". We'd worked on the Poqet, later acquired by Fujitsu, and the Newton's as well as the Casio (Zoomer) PDA's. All had a great platform, but were badly underpowered both by batteries and processing power. Until the Palm came out. Microsoft's WindowsCE operating system, now renamed PocketPC, opened another avenue of mobile development for us in our traditional handheld marketplace, with the advantage of being a very windows-like user environment and therefore useful for the business user. Outdoors the Palm has proved to be exactly the right product: it is perfectly capable of capturing our form-based data, and can expand to accept peripherals needed in the field like a digital camera etc. Palm and Symbol products are all supported and supplied by Pen Systems, we are in all their development programs and have formed close links with these manufacturers. Our software also work great on the Sony Clie's. For indoor use (mainly) the CE products we supply are limited, at the moment, to Symbol and Psion Teklogix products, although we can supply numerous other manufacturer's platforms including Compaq and Casio. We deploy our medical handheld software on CE platforms. With the addition of wireless, we have found the handheld's versatility almost boundless - web based applications now have the ability to function as remote servers for numerous applications running in the field. Our inspection software can update databases in realtime, and the medical users can update the emergency room data with patient information as soon as the examination is complete Many add-ons for the handhelds are making the PDA-format computers very attractive as an alternative for the Tablets for major data capture functions enterprise-wide. We can add a magnetic-stripe-reader, a bar-code-reader and a wireless connection on many of these devices (simultaneously), making for a highly integrated platform which can literally be put in a shirt pocket. Obviously palm-based computing still has many bridges to cross, however if we stick to our principles of supporting hardware which has the greatest usability in the field: our clients will always benefit from our ongoing research and support (as well as that of the manufacturers we partner with). By not asking more from the hardware than it is capable of delivering we won't be surprised by any performance issues over time. With Bluetooth wireless and new advances in our own connectivity software - support for an entire family of compatible handheld devices in a wide variety of networked configurations, with additional supported peripherals all field-functional, is now possible.
Check out Palm Triage or Inspector Plus for Palm  Back to Hardware |
