Sort of mobile sales/service client of Enterprise Customer Relationship Management application-help
I'm exploring into the possibility of buying a handeld device, Palm,
PocketPC and such, as a development/test platform , and I'm couting on
the everybody's wisdom to help me decide.
My target application is some sort of mobile sales/service client of
Enterprise Customer Relationship Management application. A common scenario
is a sales person/field engineer download some opportunities/trouble tickets
into his/her handheld, work on it, update the status and such, and all updates
either goes to the central database in realtime or gets synced up at
the end of the day. Here are my requirements for this platform:
1. Wireless connectivity, either built in or tethered to some
phone/modem. Real time messing capability for instant notification.
2. Decent CPU power and storage capacity. The app will likely have 20+
forms, some business logic and requires quite a bit of local storage.
3. Easy to program and debug. It'll be a quite complicated app, so
this is important.
4. Common PDA capability and can be integrated to custom app by APIs.
(eg. automatically save a service appoinment into the scheduler.)
5. Commonly available and reseanably priced.
Here are some of my thinks so far,
1. PalmOS and PocketPC are the only 2 platforms commonly available.
2. Neither platform has good java support yet. MIDP 1.0 for PalmOS
just came out, but midp is a rather limited API. Personal Java is
available on PocketPC but not too good. J2ME CDC with personal profile
sounds better, and only practical on PocketPC devices.
3. PocketPC wins hand down on hardware capability. Pricey, but should
go down if volume goes up.
4. Palm is much more popular amount business users, cheaper as well.
but will this change given the current state of Palm (the company) and
raising popularity of iPaq?
So I tend to favor more on PocketPC. any comments? Palm users?
If I decide on PocketPC, next question is which one?
Casio E-125? Compaq iPaq? HP Jordana? All of them seems to have
similiar CPU/RAM, iPaq is faster and Casio has a nice screen. Devices
with StrongARM CPU tend to have more/better software support, is that
right? iPaq also has a monochrome model which is very attractively
priced but only with 16M ram, would it run all apps of the color
models?
Decisions, decisions. Please help me here.
I test on Jornada and iPaq.
If you were going to have just one of these, one school of thought is to use
the Jornada becauses it's the slowest. Hence you wouldn't be deceiving
yourself over perceived performance issues.
Having said that, I still prefer the Jornada because ....
a) It's flip-top cover is far more practicable that the iPaq's cheap vinyl
case
b) It comes with a CF card slot
FIrst, I think you really need to decide whether real-time is
important. While it doesn't change your hardware decision, it will
seriously impact your software systems design... and which approach you
take will ultimately be determined by how the wireless coverage
intersects your service area -- if you can guarantee that you'll never
be out of range, you can put *all* the app logic on the base.
That said, and since this is a Palm NG, and I'm a Palm guy, I'll answer
from that perspective.