Let me answer first based from a software perspective:

1. The Blackberry doesn’t use either the Palm or the Windows Mobile operating system, so you’ll be limited as to the software you can run on it. (In fact, I don’t know of ANY genealogy software for Blackberry)

2. The Treo 700w (700wx) is nice in the sense that’s it’s a touchscreen smartphone, but it does have a “square” screen (240 x 240) which will limit your software choices. Pocket Genealogist DOES support square screen.

3. The “Q” is a non-touchscreen smartphone so that will limit your software as well. Software written for a touchscreen device won’t work on a non-touchscreen device unless specifically written to do so. (And Pocket Genealogist DOES support both)

From a usability point of view.

1. If your cell provider has a local store front, go get a hands on with the devices you are interested in, they can be quite different. (And non-touchscreen devices are very different) For example, the Q is a very “slim” device and the Treo is kind of “pudgy”.

2. The “Dash” is very similar to the “Q”, I found I did like the use of it as a phone. However make sure you have the numbers you want to call in the contact list, the keypad is hard to use for dialing numbers. (Same is true with the Treo but at least with it, you can bring up a on-screen dial-pad)

Hope this helps, we’ll see about posting an article about smartphones soon.

Kevin

I think a lot of people have the same difficult decision to make. In some cases with the combination, you get a phone that’s not quite as nice as a standalone and a PDA that’s not as powerful as a standalone. (Generally the processor that goes into the phone is slower so as to save battery life) It’s up to the user to decide if the convenience of the combination outweights any compromises made to combine a phone and PDA.

Then you also have the Smartphones that don’t have a touchscreen, you get an entirely different user experience. I have to admit, the short time I was using a T-Mobile Dash, I was surprised to find I liked it and didn’t miss the touchscreen too much. (And Pocket Genealogist now supports both touchscreen and non-touchscreen Smartphones) I’ve since switched from T-Mobile to Alltel and can no longer use the Dash, so my daily phone is now a Palm 700wx. (Windows Mobile of course) It’s not a bad device, but I’ve found for general phone use, I liked the Dash better.

There are some pretty powerful phone based PDA’s on the market though, I’ll look at having an article on the high-end Smartphones in a future posting.

Kevin

We do plan on having some articles too on Palms, iPhones, Nokia’s, etc. although as developers of Windows Mobile software you know where are “loyalties” lie! We get emails fairly frequently from people who have purchased a (enter non-windows mobile device name here) and don’t understand why Pocket Genealogist won’t work. Plus it’s always good to know what the competition is up too!

Kevin

Incidentally with SD cards now providing gigabytes of storage it would be possible to carry around a database of photos. The currently unfolding Family Tree Maker 2008 debacle (see http://boards.ancestry.com/topics.software.famtreemaker/mb.ashx) has had the one advantage of enabling me to extract the embedded images from my older FTM file. I am experimenting with Family Historian which uses Gedcom files as its native file format and provides for links to images. Hopefully Pocket Genealogist will one day do this too.

I wrote an article on my Creative Gene blog about your new blog. Welcome to the genealogy-blogging community!

CreativeGene.blogspot.com
CreativeGenealogy.blogspot.com