CES - Samsung Phone and Palm Challenge

Benjamin issues his challenge to Palm. Why can a small Samsung phone hold 8 gigs, but his Treo can only hold 128 megs. He is still scratching his head about this.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Benjamin Higginbotham with technologyevangelist.com, you spoke – we listened. Early this morning, we took our website upside-down by digging, digging and then digging again this little phone right here by Samsung.

This is the SGHX830, I’ve tried to say this like 5 times and just can’t say it. They need a cool name like rocker-mocker I don’t know something like that. It looks cool in person, its tiny teeny like this, but there are a couple of UI problems with it. First you open it and it’s upside down. So, you then got to flip it around like this to actually answer it. Second is only two key characters long, so you only got two keypads here. Now, they had do that in order to shrink its width down, so if we are able to re-learn that, you don't already have the thumb motions down for three wide, may be this is fine for you.

It’s a GSM EDGE phone, it’s is got 1 gig of memory built on board, it also has the camera. So, teeny-tiny you got your camera 1 giga memory and it plays your music, so if you are looking for something teeny-tiny it might work for you, otherwise, I might wait until rev 2 'till they fix some of these things.

Palm and Palm-powered devices traditionally have had less memory capacity than their PocketPC counterparts. In the past, this was largely because they didn't NEED as much (or so the advertising went). I'm not sure about their smartphone lines, but the Palm LifeDrive is the first Palm device I know of with more than 128MB on the device itself. It features a 4GB storage space (in addition to the 64MB main memory) which functions similar to an SD card. Pair this with a 4GB SD card and you have a Palm device which matches the Samsung's capacity. (I happen to own a LifeDrive and a 4GB SD card, so I actually do have a PDA with 8GB of storage space.) However, I suspect that you were wondering why Palm (and Palm-powered) smartphones don't meet or break this limit, to which I can only suggest the possibility that they don't see the need for it. After all, you can just go grab a nice 4GB SD card (the largest SD card available to date; Pretec has an 8GB SD-HC card, but SD-HC cannot be read by "legacy" SD drives, for many reasons) and pop it in for more storage space, right?

Regardless, I'm still with Ben on this one. Why don't Palm devices start including higher capacities of storage in their smartphones, especially now that the Palm OS is highly capable of multimedia tasks (Palm OS 6 even has multitasking capabilities, though no devices currently on the market use this version of the Palm OS)?

Comments

1. Posted by: Sendoshin on January 9, 2007 11:21 PM:

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