palm still rules for now

Author's Rating:

Pros: great software, small, removable battery, nice multimedia features.

Cons: 3.5 hours battery life, no case, 64 megs is really 30 megs of storage

The Bottom Line: 
great toy, bad everyday pda

Author's Review
being an avid palm powered user since 1996 made me curious to try out hp's "ipaq 1940", and boy it was interesting.

When you think about the word "pocket pc" you assume this means small pc. And yes, this is what you get. The Big pc has a desktop, start menu, drivers, system directories, a task manager, crashes a lot, and so does pocket pc. when you install a program you'll go through a setup process similar to the pc, "which folder do you want to install this program", "do you want to override this file", so on and so on. Being from the Palm side of the world this seems slow and strange. when i want to install a program on my palm i double click on one or two files, press the hot sync buttons (connection), done. on the palm one file equals one program, on the pocket pc, multiple files and directories equals one program. palms pda's seems a lot simple since i don't have to deal with directories, drivers, etc.

what sometimes works on the pc doesn't always work on a mini computer. on the palm if you have 64 megs of ram, usually i can store about 50 plus megs of programs. makes sense right? on the pocket pc, assuming you had 50 megs of ram free, this space gets divided into storage and ram. (25 for storage, 25 for ram) the programs you installed would be put into the storage, and the ram is used to load multiple programs. and since pocket pc is a multitasking pda you'll run out of memory after loading a few programs. you can usually tell your out of memory when you can't execute another program. this problem doesn't happen on the palm, since you only can execute one program at a time so you get to keep your valuable ram, unless you are playing a mp3 in the background. you could technically minic the palm, but you'll have to manually shut down all your programs in your task manager every time. so basically a pocket pc can do everything a palm can but it takes one or two more steps to do it.

what i liked. i loved the programs, especially the games. imagine, "age of empire", "everquest", these are all pc games available in your pocket. another program i liked was the pocket nes, and mame emulators! i had fun playing old school games like blades of steel, pac-man, bomberman, super mario brothers, punch out, all in real time. there are top notch programs out there, but most cost money, there seems to be a lot more free programs for the palm pda's. oh ya, viewing divx movies on the ipaq was cool as well, i just need to download the drivers to do this. this is strange to me, since we have no drivers for the palm.

oh, ya, the battery life was about 3.5 hours from 100-23 percent, i get about 2 weeks on my sony clie. but keep in mind i don't have multimedia features like a voice recorder, voice recognition, ("what's my appointments today" and the ipaq will read them back to me), mp3, and so on.

this review is more of a rant, so i'll close off by saying i fun experience with my ipaq, but i perfer my palm as my everyday organization tool because it's simple, and the batteries last a lot longer, 2 weeks longer. so if i do decide to keep my ipaq i'll use it as an entertainment tool, which i would be the gameboy for adults.