I’m typing this from an iPod touch, most likely because I hate myself subconsciously. I say that because the onscreen keyboard is painful. This is common from my experience with handhelds, for reasons unknown.

The first device I tried to use was an up iPaq pocket PC. It was an interesting device. For one thing it ran windows CE. Windows CE shares only its name with the popular OS. For one thing, the interface tried to be too much like windows. It had draggable message boxes, multitasking, and a full filesystem complete with filetypes and a different structure than the desktop release of windows. My complaint boils down to this: windows CE tries to be too complex for it to work well as a mobile device. Programs don’t close when you press on their ‘X’; they merely close their window. But wait, the only task browser was buried three layers deep in the control panel lookalike, under the memory tab. (I think newer versions buried it even deeper).

My next target is Palm OS. My experience with it isn’t recent at all, so take this all with a grain of salt. Palm OS is still ugly though. Flat colors and short curves are all that Palm OS uses. Other odd features, such as an entirely new written language, held Palm OS back. I think palm has resigned itself to using windows CE now though, so basically HP just has some competition now.

As for the black berry. I haven’t used one, and I hope I never do. The buttons are tiny, and the lack of a touch screen makes my fingers cry out in empathy towards all those who use them. Or maybe it’s spite. Whatever it is, I don’t need to be connected to everyone at every time.

Now it’s time for the device im using right now, the iPod touch. The onscreen keyboard makes me cry. The buttons are too small to reliably hit with my fingertips. With practice I can work around it, but this just highlights an obnoxious spelling suggestion tool. ‘OS’ translates to ‘I’d’ automatically. CE translates to de. The only way to stop this behaviour is to press on a small bubble the appears. The punctuation and numbers are on a separate layer of the keyboard, meaning that if you wanted (for some reason that will never be known) to use proper punctuation for your sentences you need to flip to the punctuation page, add the period, then flip back. The lack of any sort of language resembling english somewhat annoys me, although I do have to admit that character recognition generally sucks even today.

PS: Blame Apple for any misspellings