The Digital Swiss Army Knife

Author's Rating:

Pros: Crisp and beautiful TFT, excellent battery life, loud speaker, and a voice recorder!

Cons: I paid $400 for mine, it now costs $299 :-(

The Bottom Line: 
A true performer, top quality pda. Fun to use, easy to use, and so much can be done on it. You won't know how you ever lived without one.

Author's Review
WOW! My first PDA was the Palm M500, while a good/solid pda, it was a tad boring. It worked though, and I used it for about a month. Then my girlfriend needed a PDA with her jealousy that I got one, I saw this as a grand opportunity to pawn off my grayscale m500 on her and get myself a shiney new color e310. I know, I'm a terrible boyfriend. First off, if you decide to purchase the e310, immediately purchase a 128MB SD card along with it, you'll need it. The memory on board the e310 is not nearly sufficient enough to hold much as far as images and mp3s, if you're going to use it only for documents and stuff, then you should be fine with the built-in memory, but if you're going to use it like I do, to its fullest potential, then do yourself a favor and get the added memory.

First and foremost, the size, weight, and button configuration on this little baby are perfect in every respect. A lot of muscle under the hood, and fits comfortably in your pocket without even having to wear a belt to keep your pants up! The front buttons are situated at the bottom with a directional wobble-button in the middle. These "hotkeys" give you instant access to your contacts, your e-mail, your installed programs, and calander. Along the left side is the voice recording button, my personal favorite. Press it and hold it and wait for a beep, and start recording. At a meeting and don't feel like taking notes? Just hit record and set it down, as long as you don't set the recording quality to CD quality, you should have room for HOURS of voice recordings. The jog dial is right below the record button, which allows you to scroll web sites and documents without using the stylus. The battery life is outstanding, I used the e310 during moving week as a checklist and reference tool. Since the cradle and the charger was somewhere in the hundreds of boxes and bags, recharging not be possible until we start to unpack at the new place. Lasted for a week before it finally started going nuts because I was almost out of juice.

The interface, the software, and the PocketPC OS is also well done. Those of you who are familiar with Graffiti, the defacto writing method on the PalmOS will now have a choice of 4 different ways to write. The onscreen keyboard which is self-explainatory, text block recognition, full screen text regonition, and of course, even Graffiti is present. The text recognition is incredible, simply incredible. You just write on the screen, cursive, print, no matter, it shows your writing on the screen, then transforms your writing into text. It works pretty darn well too.

It would take me forever to tell you the endless possibilities of this very handy mini-computer, so I will only touch on my final overview. I have to be honest with you, I'm not a business man, nor am I a busy guy that I need to schedule meetings and stuff. I just bought it because I thought it was cool, I'm a sucker for gadgets. I use it to play games, read my e-mails while away, read ebooks, and check my news on avantgo. However, those of you who do have a busy life and need something to make sense of it all, look no further. The Toshiba e310 is the best bang for the buck bar none. When you're not importing spreadsheets or access databases, you'll be listening to mp3s via Windows Media Player, and you can do both at the same time! Truly an outstanding toy....I mean tool. :-)