Three weeks post becoming a first time pocket pc user and getting to learn a fair bit of my way around it, the device is beginning to grow on me. As a previous Palm m515 user, the differences start to pop up some immediately some more subtle after a day or two of usage. My experience and thoughts so far follow below.
Hardware: The iPAQ rx1950 and Palm m515 do not differ that much in size. I rather prefer the case for the m515 to the slip on cover of the iPAQ which is easy to forget at a meeting venue or is a chore to keep track of otherwise. The stylus on the iPAQ is cooler though and I have taken to using it on my palm as I tote both devices with me everywhere I go. It fits more comfortably in the hand and seems smoother as a writing implement than my palm stylus.
The screen resolution and colour depth is a no brainer though to be fair the palm is an older release. The battery life of the iPAQ is a gem; so far I have topped out at about 15 hours of continuous use. (Played music all day one weekend :-)
Operating system: After over a year of using the palm, I can say that it never once hang on me and continues to work like clock work. Barely thirty minutes into using the iPAQ and I could not switch it off or close the program that was running. I resorted to a cold boot by removing and then re-inserting the battery. Not an auspicious start and this become an almost twice daily habit. Recently though, as I have learnt more about how the device operates, this is down to about once in 3 days. Guess it’s not called a PC for nothing.
The Palm OS is also more intuitive to me and easier to use right out of the box. Click on the home menu and one is good to go anyway and can navigate across the entire device quickly. With WM 5, the start button is familiar to Windows desktop users; however, there are a number of menu options that require one to drill down 4 or 5 levels without a clue as to whether one is on the right track or not.
The multitasking ability of WM 5 is good though its irritating to ‘close’ a program only to discover that it is not actually closed!
Memory/Storage: Initially, the iPAQ threw up a flurry of ‘Out of memory’ warnings sometimes followed by a request for a larger storage card or for closure of some programs. I soon discovered that programs did not actually close when they were closed and rectified this ‘oversight’. This cut down the occurrences of the warnings but did not eliminate them. The iPAQ came equipped with 32 MB of memory and 64 MB of storage which would seem far superior to the m515 but the latter did not suffer similar shortcomings.
Day 2 saw me try out the iPAQ as a music player which prompted me to remove the 32 MB SD card from my palm so as to load some music. This was a feature not available on the m515 and worked fine.
On day 3, I quickly loaded Adobe Reader for Pocket PC and tried to transfer my e-books from the m515 to the iPAQ only to get a please add more storage capacity request. I subsequently added a 1 GB card and since then this is working fine for music and video.
With the Palm, the SD card was used primarily as a backup for all the data on the handheld. This is a learning point I will need to pursue in the case of the Pocket PC. How does the iPAQ handle the interaction between memory and storage?
At present, I must admit to a bias towards the palm device but will not rule out the iPAQ just yet; it gets more interesting by the day. Who knows, as I learn more, get more resources and software/utilities, I may become a convert in time.