Comments on: Handspring Might Be Moving Into China (Updated)

The problem is not how many people are over there; the question is how many people who can afford to buy a $100US handheld over there.

Of course, there are many really rich people in China; however, there are a lot of poor people over there as well.The China market still remains very cloudy.

But let's hope there will be more talented people over there who can develop new hardware/software expansion for our future PDAs.

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Lie is the future.

> Does anybody know if Chinese poses any major user-interface or developmental problems?

Depends on what the solution is to the problem. If you were to use traditional character sets of the chinese language the biggest one off the bat is probably the display of complex characters. On a 160x160 screen clarity of the charcter sets is would probably be very hard, and a very important problem to fix.

Interesting how Acer was able to pull it off with only 160x160:

http://www.sertek.com.tw/products/ia/pda_s10/contrast_s10.htm

Has anyone seen this Acer's PDA up close to tell how good/bad the fonts looked?

Anyway, the first reply by popko sounds familiar to me. I saw one of my co-workers use a PDA much like the Palm, only in Korean. It was also cheaper than any Palms at the time of purchase. The handwritten character recognition was very accurate for Korean/English. It allowed you to write as you normally would (in print, not script of course :).

What strikes me as odd is the fact that Palm does not list Korea on their International page (http://palm.com/intl/). Yet, I was able to find a Palm Korea page at http://www.palm.co.kr.

Why is Palm Korea separate, whereas Japan and Taiwan are directly a part of Palm's main site? Does anyone know why?

Language is not a problem. I have been using Chinese plug-in OS since my PalmPilot Professional. The fonts in Simplified Chinese are very readable and even Tranditional Chinese fonts don't look too bad either.
The really problem is the price and competition. $100 is a bit high for Chinese folks since that's one month salary for a middle class person! I think $50 is the acceptable price for most. Local Chinese companies have developed many kinds of PDA/Dictionary combos and they cost $25-80. Though not as good as a Palm or PocketPC, they are still very usable and most importantly affordable.

Actually I can't really comment on the situation in mainland China, as I live in HK, I seriously don't know what's going on in there, but from what I hear, the living standard in most "big" city there is actually rising to a standard pretty close to the rest of the world.

But one problem is, they are really not that interested in the PDA thingy, All they see is a over priced datebook, which it's very very hard to input chinese.

Ed, you should delete this thread.