Handhelds Catch On with Doctors

What exactly is the error? Try looking at their web site under the support section. If it isn't listed, send them an e-mail. They said mine was corrupted and sent me a new one which worked. Good luck.

Buddy, the problem is with your database, not with ePocrates. I looked up ziprazidone and it worked fine. Why would you think this is a software defect when 99.9% of the other entries work fine?

FYI - Keating Technology (Palm Canada's Maintenance Site) has claimed that Epocrates will often cause Fatal errors on Palm devices which can result in the need for a hard reset. Being responsible for ~100 devices, I have seen it happen, though it is not always common.

I am not a physician but an emergency department registered nurse and paramedic. I too use a Palm (for the last 3 years) (used to have Vx now have m505) DAILY at my job and have also converted a large number of my co-workers (MD's, nurses and paramedics). I carry both ePocrates products, a drug drip rate calculator, 5 medical texts on my expansion card (thanks HandHeldMed for your forward thinking) so at the bedside I come off sounding like an expert. In addition I keep track of our severe trauma patients, my procedures log for my medic certfication, my work and teaching calender as well as personal/family appointments and contacts. The future of medicine is point of care information, having the information available immediately at the side of the patient. Palm like devices helps make this so.

"Toy envy" has ALWAYS been alive and well in the medical profession. Probably the only ones worse are the IT profession.

Judging by your userid (Jayhawk88) I'll go out on a limb here and guess that you are talking about KU. I wasn't aware that they had this for the 3rd year students - any chance you could send me some more information about your efforts? BTW - I'm a medical student at Louisville and we do the same thing. Thanks

Brad Thomas
BThomas76@yahoo.com

Acutally, I'm not advocating for any type of PDA. I just think it's a sad situation when everyone thinks Palm is superior than PocketPC. That was what I thought before. But it was totally untrue. All I'm saying is before you buy a Palm, try iPaq or something like that.

True, PocketPC is a bit larger, maybe much larger than Palm 500. I put them in a belt case. It doesn't really matter if it's heavier or lighter than Palm. As far as battery, when I come back home, I put iPaq on the sync cradle/charger. I've never had any problem with power shortage. Technically, it lasts 10 hrs without recharging.

On the other hand, the advantage of PocketPC is significant. Most importantly, the PocketPC os (soon, CE 4.0) is designed to work with external storages and devices. One thing I can assure you, you will never have any problem storing/accessing/editing data files on your CF if you use a PocketPC. Now prey if you're using Palm.

The Palm OS was designed to be simple and stable. That was my point. But once you try to go beyond that, you're bound to have problems.

By the way, I'm not a saleperson for any PDA companies. Just doing my rotation in hospital and decided to put some inputs here.

It's just sad how blind-folded people are when they think something is better than the other. They don't even care to do any research. No offense, I know I was like that before I bought my Handera. I wouldn't even look at PocketPC if Handera had given me so much headache for external CF usage. Seriously, if the Palm OS has been better, I'd stay with it. On the other hand, I would never find out how nice and stable a PocketPC is.

Please don't post any offending email, or anything to this thread. I'm not trying to say Palm is better or worse than PocketPC. For me, PocketPC definitely stands out. But it's a personal preference. You might still like Palm if external storage is not such a issue or you're willing to wait for a while for Palm to update its OS to provide better CF/SD support. I don't know when it's going to happen. It would be the only motivation for me to stay in Palm.

By the way, I was an electrical design engineer working in Silicon Valley before I began my medical career. So I know what I was talking about, and I do know how to tweak hardware/software to make things to work.

At last, I gave up on Palm.

Good luck!

The Point is, don't be close-minded. I follow several good pocketPC websites. PocketPCpassion.com is one of them. PDAbuzz is another.

You're right, I'm not giving up on PalmInfocenter because it provides good information on the development of Palm. I'd like to see how Palm and PocketPC can benefit each other. This is what I meant by being open-minded.

If you think I'm trying to stir up troubles, I don't how that got to your mind. I'm just giving my inputs so whoever needs a PDA for medical setting can benefit from other opinions.

Please stop this kind of non-sense. I will not respond to this kind of posts any more. If you'd like to ask any comparison of these two PDA, feel free to do so. Or you can do a search on the website for PocketPC and medical, you'll find a good amount of sites.

The fact that there is 10,000 palm applications means there is intense competition among them to stand-out. The introduction of the Palm 500/505 introduced a new variable to distinguish Palm applications:

Can this run off a card?

Our company made card support a priority and introduced Kidometer 4.0 in July. Trying to sdtand-out in a crowded market is difficult and being Palm OS 4.0 compliant is one way to do that.

It would be cool if Palm Gear created an Icon (like the paint brush which indicates color support) which indicates SD/MMC card support.

Developers love to get little icons next to their product listings.

Joel Topf, MD
Editor of Kidometer
www.kidometer.com

The fact that there are so many medical Palm OS users out there actually drives software developers to develop, preferentially, for the Palm platform. The hardware / software relationship is synergistic. As the medical market explodes, the delta in numbers of more users of Palm OS than Pocket PC increases exponentially. At this point, the game is effectively over. There are just too many medical Palm OS users out there for anyone to ignore. Sure, one could devote resources to developing for Pocket PC, also, however, those resources would be better used developing even more Palm OS software. I mean, we all know that PC's have some extremely crappy features compared to Mac, however, 95% of us would never think of dumping our PC's for something else, now, would we?

One more point, for all software developers out there, specially ones on medical application, is it possible for you to code your programs in a language that's easily modifiable for both Palm and PocketPC. In short term, you expand the market of your software to PockPC users. In long run, you help the growth of PocketPC, and it will further stimulate the need for your software. At the same time, you can maintain the control of your software in Palm platform.

I don't know if it's possible to do this. But if I was developing software, more specifically, coding the software, I would seriously consider the option of running the program on both platforms.

Palm emaulators start to surface now. But it would be nice to run Palm programs directly on PocketPC.

Author: K2
Date: 08-18-2001 19:13

Since the understandably anonymous "K" has felt compelled to grace us with no less than four copies of his spam...er, post on this forum today, let's dissect this little gem, shall we?

"I bought my first PDA during this summer"

It's still summer, folks. This guy is a total newbie, but he's giving us all advice. Hmm...

"namely, Handera, the best Palm PDA around."

Totally subjective. There is no "best" Palm device for everyone. Let's separate the facts from the opinions here.

"After using it for a few months, I decided to give up on the Palm OS."

A few months? Let's see...he bought it "this summer"...it's August (still summer). Summer is three months long. So you used your HandEra 330 for, at most, two months? Somehow, I doubt it was even that long. Did you even own a HandEra 330 at all? I wonder...

"Palm as an operating system is very simple and stable. Yet, with the introduction of external storage, Palm OS becomes complicated and very unstable."

Says who, you? Sorry, but I've been using expandable Palm devices for over two years. There is absolutely no difference in stability with the addition of expandable storage, assuming you're not trying to do anything stupid, like run programs from expansion cards that aren't compatible with expansion cards (which is easy enough to verify simply by asking the program's author or checking their Web site).

"With both SD and CF, Handera has the best external storage support around."

Maybe, maybe not. Handspring's Springboard storage is nothing to sneeze at.

"However, it's such a hassel to use external storage that I couldn't do anything with it."

Maybe that's because you didn't know what the hell you were doing. I don't recall you posting here asking for help getting programs working. Did you even try?

"You could storage most of programs on the CF, but some you can't. Especially, the one requiring database access. Epocrates doesn't run from CF."

Thanks for telling us what we already know. Despite these limitations, CF is very useful for lots of other programs

"As far as data files, you can storage certain files on CF, not all, and they are NOT rewritable."

Again, DUH. This is old news, buddy. If you have to write to a file, simply keep it in RAM. How hard is that?

"Imagine if you have a hard drive you can only read, but not write to it."

In debating circles, this is known as a "straw man" arguement. Pretty lame. A Palm isn't a desktop computer. Save the half-baked analogies.

"Actually, once you start putting things on external storage, your simple, friendly palm starts to crash."

Not if you're using software that's compatible with the CF card. If you find this simple fact difficult to handle, I can't imagine how you managed to enjoy using a Pocket PC.

"I didn't know what todo until a few days ago, I tried PocketPC. It was a great substitute for notebook computer. It does almost everything you can do on a desktop."

Oh, please. Even Microsoft doesn't try to make that claim.

"And it's so much more stable. I didn't have to hard reset anything for a week."

Probably because you didn't install any third-party software.

"Medical software for PocketPC is more limited. But for every medical software you use on a Palm, there are equivalent softwares available for PocketPC."

No, there isn't. I won't even argue the idiocy of that statement. If all you want is a drug reference and a few e-books, you're set. If your needs are more specialized, good luck. And freeware? Well, there's Archimedes, and...er...um...well, Archimedes.

"And all medical document files, database that you can use for Palm, you can read and write to them on PocketPC through external storage."

Good thing you can use all those Palm docs, since there sure as hell isn't much out there for Pocket PC.

"With more people using PocketPC, PocketPC software for medical application will increase."

You hope. Unfortunately, wishing doesn't always make it so.

"So take a look at PocketPC before you buy a Palm. As a professional user who want to get the most out of your PDA, you will not regret getting a PocketPC."

Yeah, right. How much is Microsoft paying you, anyway

I agree, he was the weakest link. I cut my teeth on the Vx, and was very comfortable with everything about it. Virtually no worthwhile apps were (are?) available for CE. Remember when the 505 was released and we had no idea how to run it until a Clie guy wrote a thread on using MSMount/McFile/PowerRun? If you read that thread you can see that we were all pretty disappointed and confused. Today, if some newbie (no disrespect intended-we were all newbies @ one time) buys a 505 he is in for a big surprise if he expects to use 64MB. Palm has done virtually NOTHING to support it. He has to find some programs written by independant Japanese developers that are NOT on Palmgear. Easy to see why he was disappointed.

HI!

I agree with you. I am using the pocketpc and it is great! It is bulkier but more user friendly and has great graphics. Do you know if there is an free drug database for the pocketpc like there is epocrates for the the palm?