Impressions of Comdex

Palm, Microsoft, Sony, Handspring, Toshiba, and Hewlett Packard all had booths as did Memory Stick, the SD Card Association, and the Bluetooth Association.

The Palm and HandSpring booths had many fewer partners exhibiting than they did at PCExpo in June. I expected a larger presence here since it's a bigger show in general so I was a bit surprised. I later discovered several traditionally Palm-focused companies in the Microsoft booth. In most cases, these are companies that offer products for both devices who decided to exhibit with Microsoft because the space was cheaper. It was still very strange to walk inside the Microsoft booth and see a bunch of Palms displayed.

HandSpring is really pushing the Treo, particularly the model with the keyboard. They aren't showing the grafitti model even on request which I find rather strange. During the course of a typical demonstration they don't even mention the grafitti model although it was mentioned briefly in the large show.

The Palm booth was more fragmented, with a higher percentage of accessory and software vendors than actual Palm presence. In fact, there were two small kiosks actually manned by Palm - one for the developer program and one for the platform group with different Palm OS devices. There were also central stations with devices that people could play with.

The SD Card Association booth jointly focused on SD cards and the devices that use them. It had Palm-branded devices and the new Toshiba Genio on display as well as microwaves and other SD-enabled devices.

The Memory Stick Association booth had a lot of MS devices on display. It actually had one of the new Acer Palms available only in Asia. I really liked the device (although the one I played with didn't have a backlight which is a shame). It had much more usable buttons and a nicer feel in the hand than the Sony monochrome devices.

Sony had the new monochrome 320x320 Palm on display. The buttons are all switch-like and need to be pushed up or down to activate rather than in. I didn't like that for fingers, but it worked pretty well with the stylus. The screen is absolutely beautiful, but as with the high resolution color devices the font support is awful.

Samsung was displaying the new i300 color Palm phone. The screen is very small and quite pixelated. The device itself is more bar-like than the Kyocera, both narrower and thicker. The phone and Palm seem more integrated than on the Kyocera.

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