Introduction

Hand Held devices are becoming more and more popular these days. They are packed with a lot of features that a common man or an advanced user would want. The smart phones currently available in the market have more processing power and memory than the desktop PCs 5 years ago. These devices are connected devices with many communication options like infrared, Bluetooth, Wifi, SMS and GPRS. Handhelds are conquering the market of mobile computing. Some of the buzz words in the industry are Pocket PC, O2, Atom, blackberry etc. All these are either PDAs or smart phones. Hand held devices come in many varieties. The main difference being the screen size and screen type. PDAs have bigger screen and the screen itself is a touch pad. A stylus is used to navigate controls and usually an onboard keyboard is used.

Smart phones usually dont have a touch screen. They use a microsoft standard keypad design which consists of

1. Two Soft keys
2. Four Navigation Keys
3. One Action Key
4. One Cancel Key
5. One Back Key
6. Normal Numeric Keypad

The leaders in PDA range of devices are HP and palm. HP PDAs are standard microsoft design. There are many other manufacturers using microsoft design. Palm used to have their own OS. But recently they stopped development on their Palm OS and adopted microsoft windows for their future range of Palms. In effect the PDA market is ruled by Microsoft design models and operating systems.

Blackberry is another range of handhelds worth mentioning. They are powered by either ARM or 80386 processors. Blackberry was developed by RIM (Research in Motion) and the first model hit the market in 1999. Blackberry is very popular in the business world with its integrated email facility. Business people can access their email from anywhere using a blackberry and a supporting network. In India blackberry is being distributed by Airtel. Another distinguishing aspect of blackberry is that most of the models come with a QWERTY keyboard. Every blackberry will have an email address of its own and all mails send to this address will be delivered to the device. Custom applications can be developed on blackberry by using C++, J2ME or even the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET . Still the most popular tool is J2me.

In the smartphone range of devices the leaders are still Nokia itself with their wide variety of smart phones. Nokia smartphones are far better compared to every other smartphone manufacturer. The symbian OS on nokia phones is time tested has lived upto the expectations of its users so far. Nokias 60 and 90 series of phones are smartphones. A major disadvantage of nokia smartphones is that developing applications on symbian is difficult. A workaround to this problem is to use J2ME, but not all the features of a phone can be used very efficiently in J2me. Symbian phones are not preferred by the developer community. Nokia is trying to promote development on symbian platform to maintain their market share. The symbian OS was developed to be used with devices which are tight on resources. The OS performs quite well by conserving memory, power, CPU and running continuously for months or years with out any problem. But as more phones with abundant memory and CPU entering the market the importance of these advantages are diminishing.

Nokia faces competition from blackberry and smartphones with microsoft windows. With the introduction of easily programmable phone models with microsoft design and many of the major manufacturers supporting microsoft efforts nokia is losing its market share to windows mobiles. In the near future we can see more and more of windows OS mobiles and PDAs in the market. Han