Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Good but not great
I have been a pda person for years now. Most of that time was spent using devices running the PALM OS. What drew me to a windows based pda was the multimedia capability. In terms of games, and general multimedia entertainment, the pocket pc easily surpasses the competition. The PALM OS though is much better than the windows OS. It's easier and quicker to use and the PIMS that come with it are excellent while the pocket pc pims are serously lacking.Now the specifics of this device: The device itself is nice, very compact and pretty to look at with a beautiful screen. It lacks a little bit in terms of cpu power and why the device does not come with two expansion slots like the rest of the ipaq family is just plane silly - luckily I'm not planning on using wi-fi or I would not have bothered with this pda. Battery life is excellent. I was really expecting poor battery life like my clie had had but I was wrong. Some problems with this device are due to its being so new. At this time not much has been made for this pda for example: case, keyboard, screen protectors but this will be remedied very soon. Some parting advice:
If you use your pda strictly for business or life organization and could not really give a fig about the whole multimedia thing than go with a PALM based pda. On the other hand, if you are like me and get bored very easily and always need to be entertained, than a pocket pc is probably for you (Of course when sharp irons out the problems its been having with its linux based pda, the Zaurus, my pda recommendation will be all together different (now that pda has amazing hardware!!)).
Rating:  - The sports car of PDAs
I've been through six PDAs in the past 7 years, Including the latest offerings from Toshiba and Sony. This one blows them all away in "real life" use. NO it's not the fastest, NO it doesn't have a digital camera, NO it's not a phone....but stick it in your pocket and you feel like you're carrying a business card case. It's the kind of PDA that is easy to live with every day - it actually slips in a dress shirt pocket without making it look like you're carrying a deck of cards. It's INCREDIBLY light and thin and it fits perfectly in my hands. I honestly don't know how Toshiba's and Dells PDA division stays in business when its competition is like this. Battery power blows my mind. Six days use on one charge. It doesn't come with a cradle - so expect to shell $.. for that. It's the best PDA I've ever seen.
Rating: - Best yet from HP
I've been a Palm and Pocket PC user for several years and have had several of them, and I'm a big believer in them. They are great organizer and productivity tools for the busy business person, professional, student, or anybody who needs to be better organized. Next to my car perhaps, my PDA is the most useful piece of technology that I own.This is the best PDA HP has come out with yet. It's slightly smaller, lengthwise, than the other major Pocket PCs from Compaq, Casio, Toshiba, and Viewsonic, and at 1/2 inch thick, has one of the slimmest profiles, and is significantly thinner than the Palm Tungsten and Sony SJ30 models, which are about 1/2 inch shorter in terms of length. It would fit nicely in your front shirt pocket, where I like to carry mine, the first Pocket PC really small enough to achieve this. The unit fixes some of the problems with the early HP Jornada models, which only had 16k colors compared to the other Pocket PCs, which had 64k, and the dimmest screen. I compared this screen side by side with the Toshiba, Palm Tungsten, and Sony PEG T665C and SJ30, and it's just as bright as those. The only problem I could see was that with the unit in power save mode with the backlight off, the screen is somewhat darker and harder to read than the others, but it's okay. The screen doesn't seem to have the slightly milky appearance to it that my Compaq iPAQ 3650 has, which has a partially back-reflective screen. This is supposed to be a transreflective screen, but I'm not sure how that differs from mine, or if it does. The only shortcomings are it only has one expansion slot instead of two, like the iPAQs do, and some options aren't available yet like on some of the other units, such as a case, keyboard, and so on. There aren't screen protectors specifically for it, but my iPAQ's screen protectors might fit it, since the screens look to be the same size. But you'd need to check that to make sure. Screen protectors are essential because, although normally the stylus doesn't scratch the screen, all it takes is one piece of grit to get trapped under your stylus and then try to write something, and then you have a big scratch on your nice new screen. Someone here mentioned the 200-MHz processor was slow, compared to the 400-MHz processor in the Compaq, Dell and other models, but I doubt most people would notice the difference. This processor should be more than adequate for most people's needs. It's the same with the Sony PEG models. Although the new T655C and T665C Palm platform models have a 66-MHz processor compared to the earlier T615C, which only had a 33-MHz processor, I've compared all of these and couldn't really seem much difference, if at all, as far as regular use goes. Overall, this is a fine PDA and should provide some major competition for the popular Compaq iPAQ and other Pocket PCs.
|
