If you're looking for a cheap, yet powerful, PDA, then this is your best bet
Written: Nov 06 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great features, great graphics, good expandability, good battery life
Cons: Screen can only be viewed indoors, larger and heavier than competing PDAs
The Bottom Line: This is a cool-looking PDA for the power hungry with a tight budget, or just the casual gadget lover. I higly reccomend it because it has few cons.
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| thefirstdude02's Full Review: Dell Axim¿ X5 Pocket PC |
MY STORY
I got the Dell Axim X5, along with a few more accessories, from Dell’s website for approximately $600. For this I got this beautiful device, Dell’s folding keyboard, a 256MB SD expansion memory card and Veo’s Photo Traveler for Pocket PC. I was looking for a cheap PDA with good features, particularly a Pocket PC, with excellent features and this fit my demands perfectly.
BOTTOM LINE: A great, cheap, handheld, with a powerful processor, a nice screen that you can only see in the conditions that you would mostly want to see it in anyway, and a lot of expandability possible.
OVERVIEW
The Dell Axim X5 is the perfect Pocket PC for anyone with a tight budget – and a tight pocket. Although many people say that it is big and bulky, it does appear to be big and bulky, but it will fit into even the smallest pocket. Weight, you’ll also find, isn’t a problem. It might be heavy compared to other similar PDAs, but not noticeably, and this extra weight is made up for in features.
When I played MSRW Cart, a Go-Cart racing game for the Pocket PC, it runs beautifully and flawlessly. This shows that whatever the graphics chip is that it uses is a good one of its class among other things.
FEATURES
This is where the X5 shines most. Very few other PDAs have two different types of expansion slots, especially the two most common formats, CompactFlash (types I and II) and Secure Digital (SDIO compliant), and it is one of Dell’s biggest blunders, in my opinion, to change the X5 to the X3, and in the process removing the Compact Flash slot.
Its 32MB of RAM might seem like a lot at first, but it really isn’t, and the same is true with its 32MB of Flash ROM. The ROM is mostly used up by the Operating System, so you have about 5MB to use for yourself. 6MB of the RAM is used by the operating system, and if you run MSRW Cart racing on it, it will complain about not having enough RAM to run and it will exit the program.
Its vivid 3.5 inch LCD display is beautiful to look at – in the shade or indoors. Don’t try to look at it in sunlight because you won’t be able to, or, at least, it will be very difficult. And in pure darkness it will also strain your eyes from the brightness – its dimmest setting isn’t dim enough. Something that’s missing is a light sensor so that it automatically changes the brightness such as the one on most Compaq iPaqs, but it’s much nicer to look at than most such PDA displays - when you can actually see it.
Also with an average battery life of about 4.5 hours, you can roam far from your charger, and do what you would otherwise put off until landing on this Pocket PC.
If you get a foldable keyboard to go with it, then it plugs into the data port on the “bottom” of the PDA and therefore covers up the separate power plug, but that’s no problem as you just plug the AC adapter into the left end of the keyboard if you type on it a lot.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199+shipping
Recommended for: Students - Stylish and a Best Value
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Epinions.com ID:
thefirstdude02
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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