Buisness Issues
Our project sponsor, Dave Eaton, mentioned that Palm Computing®
devices would become more useful in his business if they only had the
software to support more of the things needing to be done. Many simple
tasks formally done on a desktop computer now can be done on a Palm
Computing® device. A Palm Computing® device is truly a shirt-pocket
product. It is inexpensive, fast, simple, and a pair of AAA batteries will
run it adequately for two or three months (compared with 15 to 20 hours on
a Windows CE product). But there's another, bigger reason for its usefulness
to businesses that foregoes all the others: the Palm Computing® platform
is easy to program. Of all other products similar to the Palm Computing®
device, none can compare in sales, either. Palm Computing® device sales
make up 65% of its market.
The Problem
With the growing popularity of hand-held computing devices, people
have been adapting them to more and more diverse uses. With these diverse
uses comes a demand for a bug-free document reader; a document reader that
can display, easily scroll through, and edit a document that has been copied
from a computer. For easy reading convenience, this document reader needs
to support the ability to insert bookmarks wherever and whenever the user
wishes. A document reader with these capabilities will allow users to turn
a Palm Computing® device into a book and enable them to read such diverse
things as newspapers, web pages, or classic novels. If the text exists on a
computer, it can be converted to "Doc format" (not to be confused with the
file names ending with extension ". doc" made popular by word processing
packages) and loaded onto a Palm Computing® device. While many Doc
readers exist currently, none of them provide a full feature set, and
many of them charge a license fee to use them.
Value of a technology solution
The value of having bug free document reader software is
substantial since there are over a million Palm Computing® devices
in use. Companies could issue Palm Computing® devices to employees
to use in a variety of circumstances such as company meetings (taking
notes, referencing ideas etc.) or anytime their employees need to conduct
company business and are away from their desk. Students could use them to
take notes in the classroom or use them to remember ideas. Lastly, having
a free document reader for the Palm Computing® device will promote
increased reading of everything that can be downloaded onto a Palm
Computing® device by everyone who has access to one. In other words,
by increasing the use of the product, the product will advertise itself.
Competitive products
Although there are a lot of other document readers out there,
none of them have all the features offered in one package. The ones that
are free have only very few features and/or are buggy. The itemized problems
of the other products are as follows.