Axim X30 624 Mhz

Author's Rating:

Pros: A $299 price tag, great wireless capabilities, great gaming machine and excellent personal entertainment center

Cons: Bluetooth configuration, standard battery life

The Bottom Line: 
Great unit w/ excellent capabilities all around. Cannot go wrong for the price. Expandable to 8 GB with new SD cards coming to market soon.

Author's Review
This is an excellent PDA. It is my second time owning an PDA, my first was a Palm based Visor Prism. This one is light years ahead and the Pocket PC 2003 operating system is far ahead of the Palm operating system. The wireless capabilities of this unit are excellent. I have spots in my house where my laptop's wireless card loses a signal, but the Axim has no trouble. The bluetooth is a great feature, but be prepared to spend a lot of time getting it set up and working properly. While very useful when operating, it can be a nightmare to configure it, especially for beginners. The game playing ability of this machine is very good also. I have Pocket Links and for anyone who is a golf enthusiast, this is an excellent game. Eye popping graphics and not a push over from a competitive standpoint. I also have some racing games and they work fine. What I don't like is the network capabilities built in to the Axim. For example, the unit comes with Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket Acrobat Reader, but go ahead and try to set up a network printer. From what I hear it can be done, I have yet to figure it out. I even purchased Pocket LAN, which is supposed to make things like that a breeze, but it is not. I also don't like that when my laptop is connected to high speed, I can't use the bluetooth as a portal to get wireless high speed on my Axim. Again, it is supposed to be able to, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Perhaps the best feature if you spend a lot of time traveling is the ability to place a large SD Card in the expansion slot (I have a 512 MB and 1 GB card) and use it to watch movies. I don't mean scratchy replicas of movies, I mean full length feature films you can put on the card yourself. There are programs available (DVD to Pocket PC) that can take a film and place it on the card. The first film I tried was Gone in 60-Seconds. It came through the process quickly and the picture is great. The sound is excellent too. Stereo sound while watching a high-quality movie on a handheld computer. You can also use the Dell as a very solid MP3 player if you have the expansion card. I have over 200 songs on my 1 GB card and still have a lot of room to spare. The Axim comes with Windows Media Player, which is great for watching the movies and listening to the music.

The standard battery gives a good charge, but when running wireless the life is dramatically shortened to 2.5 to 3.0 hours of constant use. The optional battery (1800 mAh) is excellent and offers about twice the usage time. The optional battery through Dell is $90. There are others available aftermarket for $25. I purchased an aftermarket and it works great. Perhaps the most useful feature is the ability to push one button on the side of the Axim and turn off the wireless functionality, saving battery life when necessary. With the push of a button it is back on and automatically recognizing any available networks.

The MS Office programs that come with the unit are very functional. While they are not full versions (b/c of size limitations) they are very useful and easy to use. Pocket Excel and Word are great. Excel has many of the key features you need to actually do some work on a spreadhsheet. Don't look for pivot table ability, but many key formulas and other functions are there. Adobe's Pocket Acrobat is awesome. It works very well, is fast and has virtually all of the functionality of the regular Adobe Acrobat Reader.

This one is a must for travelers and weekend wireless junkies alike.