Mid-Range PDA Purchasing Guide for LSPs:

Recommendations for Fourth Quarter, FY 2008

Purchasing Considerations

For the past three years, smartphone sales have been far outstripping sales of other handheld devices. We see this trend continuing, especially with regards to the traditional PDA market. There are currently very few manufacturers of traditional PDAs left, so device selection is limited. If your users want an internet connected device, ISC recommends steering them towards a smartphone rather than a WiFi connected PDA. While there are additional data costs associated with smartphones, the availability of internet anywhere makes this cost worthwhile in many situations.

These PDAs tend to be in the middle of the pack in terms of features and performance. They offer some of the features normally found in some of the enterprise PDAs – memory, screen resolution, and network connectivity – but at a lower price than the high end PDAs. In performance, they tend to be relatively close to the low end of the enterprise PDAs, but contain fewer features. Examples of such devices include the Palm Tungsten E2 and the HP iPAQ 111.

Please note, there are no Palm OS based devices in this handheld class that will connect to AirPennNet. If your users require the use of this resouce, we recommend considering a device from the enterprise PDA specifications. If you wish to purchase a different Windows Mobile-based PDA, be sure that your device has Windows Mobile 6 installed.

Palm OS	Windows Mobile
Palm E2	HP iPaq 111

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Page maintained by Robert L. DeSilets, Jr.
updated May 6, 2008
Next update as needed