I’ve had a Dell Axim PocketPC for the last few months. It was purchased through my company… many of us have PDAs for the same reason you do: track our calendar and contacts, take quick notes, etc.
I wasn’t the first in my group to get an Axim. A number of others had them and raved about them. My previous handheld was an HP Jornada 820 with a 3/4 size keyboard and no touchscreen. I used it extensively in meetings and on the road to capture notes and track my time. It was a bit long in the tooth – the battery wouldn’t hold a charge – and too large for quickly whipping out when I needed an address.
When I saw that the Axim could take a CompactFlash card, had wireless capability, and a nice color screen, I was sold.
So, here it sits, in its cradle beside my work desktop, dutifully synchonizing with Outlook. I put it in my briefcase at the end of the day, take it home, pull up the contact list when I need to make a call to someone, bring it back to work, and put in in the cradle.
I never take it to meetings. I never take notes on it. I’m back to pen and paper for that. I don’t even enter my time tracking in it, preferring to use Outlook on my desktop PC. (We use Lotus Notes at work, so Outlook is a redundant app that I run just for the synchronization with the Axim.)
So, I basically have a $600 read-only contact and calendar display unit.
Why has it become the attractive miniature monitor you ask?
Usability, plain and simple. The latest version of the PocketPC OS and this unit in particular just make me loathe to use it for anything else. I even considered giving it to someone else on my team for a while.
Here are a few of my problems:
1. I dislike every text entry mode it supports. The pop-up on-screen keyboard is as close as I can get, but it obscures my windows and is difficult to call up and dismiss.
2. The other entry modes are worse. The Graffiti recognizer ( block recognizer ) is touchy and too fast. It has none of the gestural usability that I always expect from a Palm device. I enter two incorrect characters every time I try to enter a single one. Letter recognizer is just silly. Transcriber is too slow and misreads much of my writing.
3. Program and window management is awful. Is it in Programs? Settings? Home? Why are there three places? Why do I have to run a special tool to manage running programs because they stack up and interfere with each other? Ugh!
4. ActiveSync doesn’t work over the wireless connection if you don’t have a cradle or cable. Why would I want to use wireless at home if I have to have a cable too? Admittedly, I don’t have to connect the Axim to get the sync to work, but I don’t want a second cradle… I have a WiFi card!
5. It doesn’t recognize the external keyboard automatically. I have to plug in the keyboard and then tell the Axim it’s plugged in. Other people who have Axims don’t have this problem, why do I?
6. I’ve hard reset the thing three times and reinstalled everything (drivers, extra programs, etc.). It works differently each time. Why? It feels like 1989 with VGA drivers.
7. Others I can’t think of or have the energy to write about now…
I’m toying with the idea of buying a Palm Zire (or Palm Classic as I like to call it). Usable, simple, reliable, and cheap.
The newest, high-end Palms are starting to suffer from too many features in competing with the PocketPCs. It feels like early Macintosh versus Windows stuff. Well-designed, closed system with lots of design guidance/rules for developers versus technically capable, open system with anything goes for developers. Then the well-designed system tries to compete on the technical side and loses its design edge. And the technical sides adds a bit of design, but never catches up to where the closed system started.
Who wants my Axim?
I don’t know, I think a lot of the usability issues are inherent in the PocketPC software, not specifically to the Dell Axim. Just one example … setting up a to-do list: you add a few entries, and it sorts the list alphabetically. Nice, pretty, perhaps, but absolutely asinine in terms of actual usability. A to-do list is the very definition of a First-In-First-Out queue, as you let stuff slide, it rises to the top of the list. To sort it alphabetically is nonsensical. But, you get your list, you check off the items, and … nothing happens. It takes 3 or 4 more clicks to actually remove an item from the list.
In short, most of this software seems to be written against some sort of spec written up by the sales people, without any thought to how real users would interact with it. Consider that, and it’s no wonder the software sits unused in the real world.