An Experimental Comparison of Two Popular PDA User Interfaces

In this paper we compare the usability of the user interfaces of the two most widely used operating systems for personal digital assistants: Microsoft Pocket PC and Palm Computing PalmOS. In our experiment, we presented users with a sequence of six tasks that exercise the basic personal information management (PIM) functionality of the built-in applications and the basic operating system. Users were observed and questioned as they performed the tasks, and data about their actions was manually gathered by a human observer. Our results show significantly faster times when users perform the tasks with a PalmOS device versus a Pocket PC device. A majority of our test participants also stated a preference for the PalmOS device when asked about their impressions of the two interfaces afterward.

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