I *LOVE* this PDA.

I have had it for over two years now. I purchased it as a factory referb and so got it for $100 off. It is still going strong.

It has been a terrific PDA. I use it every day and it is great for the typical appointments, notes, contacts, etc. However, it has also been invaluable for reading ebooks, as an MP3 player it has worked well for playing podcasts as well as for music.

Again, I truly have enjoyed this PDA. It is lightweight, has great battery life (as long as you are not constantly using WiFi). You will not go wrong with this PDA.

If you are interested in some of the more minor anomalies in the product, please consider the following observations:

You will find that Windows Media Player is somewhat limited in MP3 functionality (yes, it plays MP3, WMV files, and has done a good job with video files as well), but you may want to add MortPlayer (freeware) as your MP3 file player - it is just far better.

To really get the value of this device, you will find that adding as much flash memory to it as possible will really make it shine. I have 1GB of SD in mine and it works great - there appears to be no way to determine how much flash memory it can support beyond that.

Along with that, purchase of an external flash reader/writer will permit much faster data transfer than the USB speed of the PDA. It is really worth getting it.

Also, the web browser works surprisingly well for most websites. Really nice if you are close to a wireless hotspot. That said, WiFi connectivity sometimes takes a little while to connect and sometimes says "connected" when it is really still trying to connect. Selecting which wireless SSID to connect to is somewhat non-intuitive and takes a little fiddling sometimes. Also, there is no way to manage separate WLAN profiles that might happen to connect to different locations that use the same SSID. I am assuming that most of these issues are Windows PocketPC related and not necessarily limited to the PDA itself. Another anomaly: the "flight mode" option (that should be present whenever the wireless connectivity arrows are attached) sometimes disappears for no apparent reason. This merely requires going directly to the WLAN control page to turn WiFi on/off. If you leave WiFi on, it does severely decrease battery life. I have noticed that even when the PDA is off, leaving WiFi on still drains the battery faster. It would have been nice if HP would have put together their own custom wireless manager to address all of these. That said, once you have established your connectivity for each of your normally-used sites, the wireless works fairly seemlessly and appears to favor SSIDs to which you normally connect when you are in range of one of them.

I have had good success with 3rd-party PDA programs such as Adobe Acrobat, Skype for PDA (the ultimate cordless phone), MortPlayer (freeware MP3 player - terrific!) and have programmed the keyboard / function buttons for greater control of MP3 playback, file deletion, etc.

Bluetooth connectivity works, but does not appear to support an audio device (like a Bluetooth headset). This was disappointing when I wanted to use Skype or to do simple audio capture. Plantronics blames the PDA for not having an audio driver.... Again, the built in microphone does a good job.

ENTER button is sometimes misinterpreted as having pressed OK and will close the window while using the notes program.

As you may already be aware, there are some anomalies in the ActiveSync program (which are not specific to this PDA but, I believe, affect ALL MS PocketPC devices:

1) Snoozing a reminder on the PDA does not snooze it on the PC or vice versa. This is regardless of whether the PDA is docked or not.

2) Dismissing reminders DOES synchronize, but sometimes ActiveSync gets confused if you dismissed appointments on both the PDA and the PC and then try to sync them.

3) Occasionally, duplicate appointments are created. However, the newer versions of ActiveSync 4.1 and above appear to have fixed this.

4) Photos of your contacts (Outlook 2003 and above) will not be sychronized to the PDA.

Again, I believe that these issues affect most PocketPC PDAs in general and are not limited to this PDA. (Check out the Microsoft ActiveSync forum and you will see that this has been more of a chronic problem).


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 399
Recommended for: Gadget Lovers - Trendy and Hip