I have, arrayed in front of me, a Palm V and a CompaqIPAQ 3850. I am crying quietly. Why? Because having been quite content with my Palm V for several years I recently convinced myself that I needed an IPAQ. What a prat. To exacerbate matters, I didn't just settle for a basic unit. Oh no, I had to go the whole hog and get the SatNav jacket and all the full nine yards didn't I? After a brief (and I MEAN brief) honeymoon with the thing I have come to the conclusion that the IPAQ is twice the price, twice the size, twice the weight, twice as bug-ridden and has half the battery life of the Palm. As if that wasn't enough, it has an operating system which, like its big brother Windows, needs to have a lie down every now and again. To accuse it of being underdeveloped would be to do an injustice to underdeveloped things.
The
one saving grace of the IPAQ is its brilliant colour screen quality. However, having said that, I would gladly trade screen quality for a battery life long enough to go to the shops and back. OK, OK, I'm exaggerating, but it ain't great. The little Palm, with its rechargeable cells will run quite happily for up to a month without complaint. The IPAQ, on the other hand, after only a day or two away from its docking cradle will start screaming at me to be plugged in for juice like some errant bloody Tamagotchi. Worse still, the back-up lithium cell is not man-enough to preserve the memory contents if the battery does go completely flat so you have to start from scratch as if it were a new unit (you shouldn't lose your contact and diary info because that will be backed up on your PC - You don't HAVE a PC? Oh dear.). The Palm will happily preserve its memory contents just on the lithium cell alone.
It's not even as though the IPAQ is a particularly good piece of design. Aside from the, admittedly, beautiful brushed alloy casing it incorporates one or two seriously shit pieces of production engineering. For example, the on/off button sits on the front of the unit, proud of the face. Guess what?V? It means that it is very prone to switching itself on while inside your briefcase (it's way too big to carry in your pocket, unless you are the jolly green giant). More than once I have been made to look somewhat less than professional in meetings when I have retrieved it from my case only to find that it has flattened its bloody battery en route. Worse still, the connecting socket at the base of the unit demands one of the flimsiest male connectors I have ever seen. No strong he-man type jack plug for this baby, oh no, it's a thin, delicate tongue of plastic and copper that looks as though it has the breaking strain of a Kit Kat. Still, I contented myself with the belief that the SatNav would save me hours of blundering around in unfamiliar cities trying to get to such-and-such an address. Unfortunately, that didn't really materialise either. When you slot the IPAQ into its somewhat less than slimline SatNav jacket, the whole ensemble is big enough to qualify as an offensive weapon in its own right. And the recommended way of securing this, collectively, getting on for a grand's worth of gear to your vehicle? A rubber sucker on the end of a bendy rod. Ye Gods, - what are these people thinking? It certainly makes long motorway journeys that much more interesting. Every journey is interspersed with the monotonous crash of the unit throwing itself onto the floor of the car yet again. Thank Heaven for rubber car mats.
I refuse to even discuss the faff I had installing the SatNav software on to the unit in the first place. Suffice to say that after about four shell shocked hours of running out of the house and into garden in order to see if it would acquire any satelites yet, I finally found a note on the manufacturer's web-site politely informing me that the install had to be conducted in a certain sequence otherwise the fucking thing might not work. MIGHT NOT? You bastaaaaards! The neighbours were convinced that I'd finally lost it after watching me running round and round in the garden in my dressing gown and slippers with a big black thing in my hand, looking imploringly skywards (as if that would help) and screaming obscenities at my long suffering wife like “Why won't the bastard thing work Jan?”
As for the little Palm V? It just does what it says on the box. No tricks, no flashy lights, just good, predictable workmanlike behavior. Furthermore, Palm do a smashing (literally) return-service on damaged units. Like all PDA's it is relatively easy to drop the unit and damage the screen. Palm Tech Support will replace the unit by return of post, no questions asked, for a fixed fee of about fifty quid which, for a cack handed bugger like me is a God send.
Quintessentially a PDA is just that. A diary come address/phone book. Don't be seduced by the promise of anything else, no matter what the marketing blurb may say. All else is vanity. The ONLY area where the IPAQ scores over the Palm is in its true integration with MS-Outlook. This means that once it is sitting comfortably in its cradle and connected to the Desktop, it will reflect changes to my diary/contacts in real time. So if, for example Alison, my PA, takes a call and books an appointment in my diary, then there is no need for me to remember to do a sync at the end of the working day since it will already have been updated in the IPAQ. Trust me, it's not worth the three hundred quid difference in price.
In the final analysis, the IPAQ is nothing more than a big heavy piece of junk. The Palm is a superbly designed little unit that can be used with or entirely without the services of a PC host. The IPAQ, on the other hand, is a poorly executed, forced implementation of an operating system and hardware mix which was never intended for mobile use and I cannot conceive of anyone ever using one without an attendant PC. I am seriously contemplating selling mine to Her Majesty's Navy in the profound hope that they can at least find gainful employment for it as an anchor because it's bugger all use for anything else. Apologies to all those IPAQ devotees out there but I can only play the ball where it lies.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Handheld - 64 MB RAM - Screen: 3.8 in inch - Display: TFT active matrix - CPU: XScale PXA250 - Infrared, Bluetooth - Microsoft Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2002
Handheld - 64 MB RAM - Screen: 3.8 in inch - Display: TFT active matrix - CPU: SA-1110 - Infrared, Bluetooth - Microsoft Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2002
Handheld - 128 MB RAM - Screen: 4 in inch - Display: TFT active matrix - CPU: XScale PXA310 - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi - Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Classic
Brilliant! Thank god I never paid £299 for the Compag Ipaq 3870 then! I was seriously thinking about it due to its built in Bluetooth but I have been a big fan of PalmOS for a while (Im developing for it now) so I went for a Sony PDA. Originally I bought a secondhand S300 but have recently moved up to the Sony SJ30 which is more than sufficient. OK its colour but it doesnt play movies and MP3 as well as the PocketPCs but hey like you said, I want it to be useful, not vain! Regards, Ray
Ophelia 03.12.2002 19:27
Hee hee - I loved your disadvantage!
SueMagee 23.11.2002 16:36
Excellent! Oh, I did enjoy that. I've never heard them described as an offensive weapon before!
Advantages: Quick, easy to use, easy sync of Microsoft programs Disadvantages: No support for non-Microsoft software, crashing, battery life, user manual... what manual
Advantages: Fast, sleek, expandable, runs Windows, lots of third party support Disadvantages: Difficult to get accesories in UK, bit pricey, shame it's not 64MB
Advantages: Clear Screen, fast enough to use, range of standard applications, easy connectivity, great handwriting recognition Disadvantages: Relatively short battery life (15 hours), slow data transfer on mobile (phones fault!)
Nov 22nd, 2002
(Dec 5th, 2002)
very helpful by (94%):
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