Dell Axim X50v

...at least.

Dell is well known around the world as the providers of desktop computers, laptop notebooks and servers. A mega conglomerate started by Michael Dell which has done some crazy things with computer technology that only hardcore techno geeks understand i.e. their recent project Dell XPS 600 Renegade with quad SLI graphics that needs a 850W power supply! Am average household computer power supply is about 450W, so imagine the ...
...a typical colour scheme for Dell with their 'any colour is alright as long as it's black' method. Although not one of the smallest or lightest PDAs at 73mm by 119mm by 17mm and weighing in at 175g, it has so many features packed into it you would forgive it for this little gripe. It also feels really solidly built, unlike other PDAs that feel like the company just quickly and sloppily slapped some plastic over the electronic components.

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Information accurate as of 21/02/06

Every era there is a hero of epic proportions, waiting to unleash their fury upon the evils of the world. They are charismatic, strong of mind, body and soul, and can sway the hearts of millions. Legends are made of them and the stories are passed down from generation to generation of their exploits. Battle with a demon? Recorded. Fight and win against a legion of loyal followers to an evil dictator? Chronicled. Create a PDA of Herculean status and own up the world of mobile handheld computing? Well… they have an instruction manual at least.

Dell is well known around the world as the providers of desktop computers, laptop notebooks and servers. A mega conglomerate started by Michael Dell which has done some crazy things with computer technology that only hardcore techno geeks understand i.e. their recent project Dell XPS 600 Renegade with quad SLI graphics that needs a 850W power supply! Am average household computer power supply is about 450W, so imagine the electricity bill.

Here they have created a PDA (personal digital assistant) that is very powerful. It is one, if not the most powerful, PDAs available on the market at this moment in time. Only time will tell if a more powerful one will be released (and I am sure it will happen), but for now there is little that can fault the power and features packed into this handheld device.

This device is black and silver, a typical colour scheme for Dell with their 'any colour is alright as long as it's black' method. Although not one of the smallest or lightest PDAs at 73mm by 119mm by 17mm and weighing in at 175g, it has so many features packed into it you would forgive it for this little gripe. It also feels really solidly built, unlike other PDAs that feel like the company just quickly and sloppily slapped some plastic over the electronic components.

The PDA itself has a power button at the top centre of it above the screen, four silver hot keys to access calendar, contacts, messages and return home. There is a direction 'controller' with a select button in the centre for browsing without your stylus if it becomes necessary or for games. So far it's pretty standard stuff that appears on all Dell PDAs. To the left of the PDA is the hook for the lanyard/wrist belt so you can let it hang on your arm if you need both hands when used in public, a lock switch to prevent interactivity, a wireless on/off button so you can activate Bluetooth or wireless LAN without browsing the PDA software to do it, and a record button which activates the voice recorder so you can use the PDA as a Dictaphone.

Above the PDA is an earphone/headset port so you can plug in standard MP3 type earphones, or those with a microphone or mouthpiece. There's also a stylus holder on the right hand side, a Compact Flash memory card slot in the centre and just in front of the compact flash is a SD/MMC memory card reader slot.

At the back of the PDA is the battery cover which has a simple side-sliding lock to hold it in place and stop the battery falling out, and a reset button which will need something thin such as a stretched out paper clip to press. At the bottom of the PDA is the cradle slot where it connects to your cradle to synchronise with your PC.

The hardware capabilities of the PDA are as follows:

Processor: Intel XScale 624MHz. This is the fastest PDA processor at the moment, so it can handle media files and other processor intension tasks with ease.

Installed ROM: 128MB. This is where the PDA's operating system and application software is built into. You see Pocket Word and other pocket programs that loads up with Pocket Windows? It's all here, so even when you fully reset the PDA and get rid of all data, the operating system etc will still be here and safe.

Installed RAM: 64MB. This memory is shared by the PDA from personal storage to required memory to run programs. It doesn't look like much, but PDA programs are usually very small in size i.e. 40KB, so the RAM is plenty enough.

Graphics: Intel 2700G graphics processor with 16MB video RAM. This is one of the main selling points of the Dell x50v. It has a standalone graphics chip with its own memory to render 2D and 3D graphics. That's right; this PDA can handle 3D graphics with its built-in 3D acceleration. The graphics also aids decoding media files such as AVIs to take the strain off the main Processor. Although why a PDA needs 16MB (8MB is already overkill) is beyond me.

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003 SE. I can't really see much difference from the original Windows Mobile 2003 (note the missing 'SE'), except that it has better 3D graphics with the interface i.e. the keyboard has 3D looking keys rather than flat looking ones.

Screen type and size: 3.7" touch sensitive TFT. This screen is special in that it is capable of displaying 480x640 pixels. This doesn't sound like much until I tell you that it has 4 times more pixels than standard PDAs, which have 240x320 pixel screens. This means that this PDA can display DVD quality resolution video with ease.

Battery: 1100 mA Lithium Ion battery. This is the standard battery that comes with the x50v and fits inside the PDA with no problems. A larger, higher capacity battery is available at 2200 mA, but it bulks up the back of the x50v by some measure. Put it this way, it won't fit in your top shirt pocket anymore.

Wireless: Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11b, Infrared. How many wireless options can a PDA have? You can access Bluetooth, or go Wireless LAN, or if you're feeling retro then you can do an infrared connection.

Expansion slots: Secure Digital/Multi Media Card slot, Compact Flash Type II slot. Usually PDAs come with only one expansion slot, but this PDA comes with 2 slots for greater future expansion.

Other: Built-in microphone and speaker.

The PDA came with a charger, cradle, slip case, manual and software CD. The software CD has two 3D games made especially for the Dell x50v, Fathammer's Stuntcar Extreme driving game and the 3D puzzle game Enigmo, which look gorgeous and run well on the Dell. I would say that they are on par with the Playstation Portable, and even better than the Nintendo DS' graphics. If this is a sign of things to come in the gaming land of the Dell PDA, then I can't wait for the next 3D accelerated game!

Although the manual was very helpful, using the PDA was very easy has all that was required is to take the stylus from the stylus holder and switch the PDA on. The first screen would introduce you to the PDA and run a stylus calibration test to ensure accurate usage of the touch screen. Afterwards you can just enter your details into the owner information window and it is officially your PDA.

The screen is a joy to behold even when not in 3D mode. The 2D capabilities of the x50v when in Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003 SE are simply amazing. After being used to the blocky and low resolution PDAs, this was a welcome treat as everything is super sharp, clear, and bright. The legibility of text increases by four fold on this screen, and there is no ghosting (slow screens leave an after image) at all.

First thing was first, I had to install programs onto the x50v to make the most out of it. To install any programs on the PDA, you first need to install ActiveSync onto your PC, this program allows you to synchronise the PDA with your PC so you can share address books, emails, etc. After installation is complete, I connected the USB cradle to the PC and then placed the PDA on the cradle. It was immediately detected and synchronised with the PC. After that, installing the programs for it was as easy as downloading them from www.tucows.com, double clicking on them and wait for them to transfer over to the PDA. Easy as pie.

The main programs I installed were TCP Media Player and WinMobile Torrent. TCP Media Player is a free download, and although the x50v has Windows Media Player built-in, this player is better at playing media files than it (other than WMV files which Windows Media Player excels at unsurprisingly.) WinMobile Torrent is the bittorrent client for the PDA that allows file sharing with the PDA over the internet. I do not condone illegal sharing of files; I only installed it to test its capabilities. WinMobile Torrent isn't free and costs about £11 to purchase a licence.

After installing the programs, I connected up to the PDA a 4GB Microdrive to the compact flash slot, and a 1GB SD card to the SD/MMC card slot. I put on the 4GB Microdrive a few TV ads (namely the new Honda one with the people making the sound effects to the car driving) encoded at DVD quality 720 x 480. The SD card I was going to use as a program installation location and download location. No reason for that, I just wanted to do that for the sake of being able to do it. The TV ads played on TCP Media Player with no slow downs or screen errors at all. It was smooth, sharp and an extreme pleasure to watch the ads play out at high resolution on the PDA. I was also surprised at the audio reproduction of the device, as it was extremely high quality and sharp for a speaker of diminutive size, though it lacked bass.

Afterwards, I decided to use browse the internet with the PDA through the wireless connection. I activated the wireless connection with the button on the side and immediately the wireless option appears asking if I wish to activate wireless LAN. After switching it on, it discovered my wireless network and asked for the WEP key to enable connection. The setup to connect the PDA to the wireless network was almost effortless (except for a little search for the WEP key to enter it into the PDA). It has an amazing range and hardly drops the signal even though I am at the other side of my home. Its range is better than my laptop with a Linksys PC Card installed.

With internet established, browsing can be achieved with the Internet Explorer program. I decided to browse to a Linux website and download the latest free distribution of Linux Mandrake using WinMobile Torrent. I activated the WinMobile program and downloaded the torrent files for it, before setting up the program to download to my Microdrive (trust, I had to because the distro is huge). It detected available people online for download, and then started to download its merry heart away at 50+ KB speeds on my PDA. I was surprised with this too since it managed to prepare a massive size chunk on the Microdrive so quickly and then download at that speed.

I later wanted to test the Bluetooth capabilities, and so activated Bluetooth and tried connecting it with my phone. I took a photo with my mobile phone and prepared to transfer it to the PDA. The PDA in Open mode detected the file and received it with no hassle at all. Although the picture looked really bad on the x50v (due to the phone having a rather pathetic camera), it still worked no problems.

The PDA does sound amazing, but there were a few problems with it that I encountered whilst testing it.

The screen while is bright, clear, and sharp has quite a bad viewing angle when rotated 90 degrees into a landscape layout. You can set up Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003 SE to display in that layout and play movies like that as well. But when in that layout, the screen becomes a stain on the eyes as one eye sees the screen clearly whilst the other eye sees a blurred, tinted image due to the low viewing angle. Although I can live with it, I've seen screen handle side viewing much better i.e. Fujitsu Siemens LOOX 720.

Internet Explorer is a great web browser on the PDA, but website all get squashed, look strange and out of proportion. Some website where the pictures are supposed to be the same size have half of them deformed and scaled down, while the others are humungous. Text also suffers the same thing, and no setting of the html layout in the options will remedy it. Downloading files is also a little gripe as when you click on a file, it doesn't always come up with a dialogue asking you where you wish to save the file, and instead saves it on internal memory. What if I was downloading a massive file which internal memory cannot handle?

Thanks to abdrewawolfe, I noticed another lacking feature and that is a built-in camera like on the LOOX 720. Thing is, the camera on the LOOX is only a 1.3MP and I tested it myself finding the quality to be less than average indoors. Outdoors it is better, but I still think that PDAs don't need a digicam built into it. Another thing with the LOOX720 and x50v is the availability of stylus' you can buy for it. The Fujitsu Siemens LOOX 720 you can buy a triple stylus pack for a relatively cheap price of around £10 - £15. The X50v though could set you over £20, and that is just for 1 stylus as well. Doesn't make sense does it?

The last problem, and may be the biggest, is the low battery performance. Having all those features is good, but it really hurts the battery life whilst in use. The battery runs an average of 2 hours 30 minutes when not under heavy usage and constantly on. However, that time reduces to 1 hour 40 minutes when watching a high resolution movie, and reduces even further if wireless/Bluetooth is active as well. I used to have a HP iPAQ H4155 PDA, one of the smallest PDAs with Bluetooth and wireless LAN, and its battery life was easily over 3 hours standard use, over 2 hours with wireless LAN. But is that really the Dell battery's fault? Given that it has a shed load of features, it is understandable. A higher capacity battery that doubles the usage time can be bought, but that also double the depth of the PDA.

Overall, an amazing PDA with many advanced features not even seen on other devices. I added 5GB of storage into it, and it's turned, literally, into a multimedia portable device. Besides fro ma few problems of course, the x50v is one heck of a gadget to use and organise your life, listen to MP3s as well as play the occasional game and watch the occasional film. If you something more portable, less features and better battery life then go for the HP iPAQ H4155. For everyone else, wjhy settle for less than this?

Bonus: This device can also work as a GPS guidance system if you add the TOM TOM Bluetooth GPS to it. Great stuff!

Current Price: £270.19

Bonus: If you add the TOM TOM GPS Bluetooth device to it, you can use this PDA as a GPS guidance system.

You can display the PDA on a TV or monitor by using the VGA out cable. 

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