Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.
I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.
Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.
The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.
Bullet point review:
- first impression when I took it out the box was how light it is, much lighter than my old palm. It's fairly thin as well, maybe half an inch thick. It would fit better in a trouser pocket if not for the carry case that comes with it which is almost as thick again.
- nice solid build quality: HP after all.
- stylus has a tendency to fall out: I put it in the carrying case the wrong way round to restrain it or I would certainly lose it.
- no charging cradle: comes with a USB cable and a mains adapter that plugs into the USB cable: rather awkward and fiddly and annoying that it cannot charge from the USB port. There are aftermarket USB cables available that will charge it.
- synchronises with the pc using activesync and I was amazed to discover that it won't sync over the wifi. Apparently microsoft decided it was a security hole and they couldn't think of a way to plug it so they just removed the feature. This leaves USB or infra-red so I'm using USB when I feel the need. Many pocketpc apps are available as cab files that can be downloaded directly to the device over the wifi and installed. Some producers are not enlightened to this and ship apps with windows installers that use activesync and hence can only be installed at home base.
- the device has 32M of 'program memory' for running programs data and this isn't really enough. The symptoms of this seem to be the o/s terminating apps that are not in the foreground. If you have, say, windows media player playing something then you can only run maybe one more program before something gets randomly zapped. Microsoft have tried to create a paradigm where you don't have separate applications but flip between different modes without worrying about having to close apps down. Apps are closed automatically by the OS as memory runs low and should be designed to save their state such that when they are reopened they are in the same state as when they were shut down. Unfortunately it looks like developers use standard development techniques and applications being suddenly terminated by the OS leaves the user high and dry.
- it has another 32M for storing programs but I bought a 1G SD card and I put everything in that.
- the screen is just about big enough. It is ok for reading without scrolling too much. For most web browsing it is awful unless I use http://skweezercom or google mobile to strip out any fancy stuff.
- the character recognisers that come with it are not much good: the handwriting recognition (transcriber) is slow and inaccurate. I am using something called Tengo which is a bit like predictive text on a phone so involves hitting only six big buttons. It has some clever design features and there is something about it that is kinda fun. I am writing this review with it so you may spot predictive-text style wrong word errors.
- a frequently used feature is the reset button: windows mobile is a typical windows o/s and isn't sophisticated enough to offer robust task management. Applications can lock it hard and banging on an unresponsive plastic screen is particularly fruitless.
- it has speaker and microphone. The speaker is just about loud enough to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried skype on it, the skype site doesn't list the rx1950 as supported and the cpu may not be fast enough.
- has 3.5mm audio jack and the sound to my ears was pretty good. It is a good mp3 player.
- battery life is very good, one charge gives a good day of use.
As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.
I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.
Bluetooth is no comparison.
. It has:
Peter's Moblog
