Slashdot Mirror
64MB Compaq IPAQ On Sale -- Or Not?
jaredcat writes: "The until-recently rumored new 64MB IPAQ handheld with improved expansion-card capabilities finally went on sale today at Compaq Direct for $649. Seeing as the lesser 3650 model can't currently be found on the street for love or money (I've seen it listed as high as $1000), I'm grabbing my 3670 while I still can." For some reason, I can't find the higher-end one on the site -- am I alone? With 64MB, this beats all but my most recent computer. Pop in my Merlin wireless card, and I can roam the city talking to myself all day? Excellent.
8 hours? That's it? That's pitiful. Palm V's have internal batteries that get a day or two of continuous use, and a LOT more standby time. And they're 2/3 the thickness of previous Palms or less, which are (as others have admitted) significantly smaller than almost any CE device.
And yes, I guessed it might have an internal battery. But even with Li-Ion or Li-Poly, there's still a limit on how much power you can store before the thing gets huge. As I said - PC cards cause noticeable drain on laptops, where the batteries themselves have 3-4 (or more) times the volume of an entire iPaq, let alone its batteries.
And even if this PCMCIA sleeve had its own battery, it would have to be HUGE to supply a decent amount of power (see above).
My WorkPad fits in my pocket easily with no effort. It carries full maps of my own town and two others, carries movie listings at all times, and all of the usual addresses, etc. All in only 2M of memory. (I do wish I had more - but 8M would be more than I'd ever need. That could store an obscene number of maps...)
Browsing from a PDA would be the most painful experience I can imagine... Screen is way too small.
If you REALLY need that obscene kind of power, buy a nice, cheap Palm, and a used laptop. You'll spend about the same price as these super-CE devices, and have a LOT more functionality. Until there's the wireless bandwidth available for videoconferencing (available on WLANs, but not in general), there's absolutely no need for these PDAs on steriods, they're a waste of money.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I wasn't saying that the Newton was a bad piece of hardware. It just wasn't suitable to the PDA market, where it got destroyed by the significantly smaller and battery-saving Palms. Some people may have grown an attachment to it. But the majority (such as myself) did not, which is why it died. (Yes, I had a Newton - I hardly ever used it. It was slow, ate batteries, and HUGE.)
Having a huge load of features on a PDA is useless if it doubles or triples the price of the unit and >90% of the target market doesn't really want it.
Yeah, these look cool to geeks like us. But the primary market for these devices are businessmen to whom geek-factor such as "Cool, I can play MP3s, too!" is useless. An 8M PalmOS-based device is enough to more than satisfy the needs of most execs who need a PDA.
2M PalmOS-based devices are more than enough for a college or HS student who wants a bit of help getting organized. And unlike the iPaq, etc, Palms are affordable for the majority of college and HS students - I have lots of non-geek friends with Palms who use them regularly. They would NEVER think of getting anything more expensive, because they don't even use their Palms to their full potential.
The above two markets are what really make money, not the small geek minority.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No, don't buy a Neo 25.
:)
Buy an MP3 CD player, and a CD burner.
It will be more portable, and with the extra $100+, you can get (worst-case if you're REALLY lazy about shopping) 65 gigs of storage.
Solid-state MP3 is a waste of money, and will be for a long time to come.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I see these super-handhelds going the way of the Newton.
:)
The Newton was the same as the iPaq - the handheld that tried to do too much. And look at it's fate.
Palm, OTOH, keeps things simple. This results in devices that are:
a) Much less expensive
b) Smaller (Size was one of the main factors in the Newton's death. And all of these CE devices are larger than even Palm's largest.)
c) Power-conserving. Batteries in a Palm last forever. How often do you have to change the batteries in one of these iPaqs?
As to power consumption: For one, more memory = more power consumed. 8MB Palms have higher current draw than 2MB ones. Not by too much... But 64 megs?
PCMCIA - PCMCIA cards can cause a noticeable drop in battery life in a laptop with a huge Li-Ion battery, what do you think they're going to do to a handheld on AAAs? (Even AAs - But as soon as you move to AAs, your handheld is losing any size advantage it might have had.)
These handhelds are "cool", but I don't see them as anything more than that. My WorkPad (Palm III) suits me just fine, the only thing I wish I had was 8MB of memory, not 2. But 64 is ridiculous. (Eventually, I may solder in some bigger chips...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This reply is coming to you from an iPAQ running Linux over an 802.11 connection :-)
I'm writing it in vim in an xterm (actually rxvt) which was spawned by w3m, using GPLed handwriting recognition software. 'uname -a' gives:
Linux ipaq 2.4.0-test11-rmk1-np3 #67 Tue Jan 2 16:46:11 EST 2001 arm4l unknown
Check www.handhelds.org for the full story.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
What's the battery life like on these things, particularly when running a wireless card?
Still, 64MB of storage would be awfully sweet on a Palm...
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I know, and I could have, what, a gigabyte of secondary storage with a TRGPro and an IBM CompactFlash minidrive.
Onboard ram would be cooler than the secondary storage, though, because it would probably use less power, and because it would be real memory you could use without the hassle of accessing the storage media.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
As others pointed out, the Zip was already on the market, and pretty popular among Mac users (no/slow Internet + Graphic Design = need for removable media).
There was a sort of handshake agreement between major PC companies to standardize on the LS-120 in 1995 or so. Then a big cost-cutting war started between Compaq and Dell, and they kinda forgot about adding any bells+whistles. Anyway, the place I worked got a pallet full of Compaqs with LS-120s at no extra cost one month. The next shipment was back to standard 1.44 drives.
Since then, it just missed it's mark. Back in those days, hard drives were 540MB and 1G were just shipping, so 120MB was compartively a lot of storage. Now days, it seems most consumer machines ship with CD-RW, so there you go.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I'm curious what Compaq products you've had experience with.
It's true that their consumer desktops (Presario) line is pretty piss-poor, but I've always found their corporate stuff reliable and their server stuff excellent.
Anyway, they're a big company - so big that maybe they don't realize that they're tarnishing their once top-of-the-industry reputation with a bunch of young users with those cheap crap home units.
My understanding is that the iPaq handheld comes out of the old DEC part of Compaq - take that for what it's worth.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If all you want is to roam the streets all day talking to yourself, all you need is some magic mushroom tea. Why waste money?
I have a quick question.
My experience with Comaq has been pretty piss-poor. In fact, I've said in the past that I would never, ever buy anything from Compaq again. I've held to this promise for over five years now.
So my question is, how does the IPAQ rate? I've heard lots of random stuff, but nothing definitive. People seem to like it. But it's from Compaq. How does this balance out? Is it worth calling off my vendetta against Compaq because they have actually come out with a decent product?
---
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
I've been using a 64Mb iPAQ with a PCMCIA adapor and WaveLAN card to run some of my PhD. stuff on, because I'm doing low-power wireless applications stuff. I run the handhelds.org Linux on it and build stuff in Python and I have to say that it rocks.
:(
The big advantage I can see of device like this is that they take up the functionality of MP3 players and other wearable devices and put them in a single, flexible unit. Also, I can take the thing home, work on it, albeit via a client PC to view the screen on, and then walk in to the lab and log back in there, again from a dumb client.
The big problem I see is battery life. The original Itsy dealt with this by having a cholesteric display, I think, so that it could be powered off but still display data. Battery life of an identical unit to mine used as an MP3 player and Palm-style device is about 3 days, while mine gives about 6 hours with Linux on it. So it's a cradle-baby.
As the technology (hardware & software) improves to take more account of power, I think these things will really take off.
But then I would say that, because that's the subject of my PhD. So I suppose I should really have said "biased opinion" in the title...
Looks like the poster didn't remove his session ID from the link. Now all of Slashdot seems to be adding to a universal cart.
At one point the total was well over $150,000.
Sam
If the site can't adapt itself to a palmtop screen, that's poor Web design, not a fault of the palmtop. The specifications for the Web were carefully designed to be device (and resolution) independsnt.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Visit http://www.times2tech.com/pocketpc.html to get on a long waiting list.
Roaming the city talking to yourself all day, that is. People have been doing it for years. I usually give them my spare change as I walk by...
-Puk
I have had nothing but good experiences with Compaq, but I don't touch their personal line. The iPaq desktops at the office, proliant servers, deskpro systems, they've all been terrific. Also, their support is top notch. I can call up at 3 AM, get a useful person on the phone, and if I need a part, they FedEx it out quickly. They've been tremendously helpful for all my systems.
Alex
Anyone with a digital tuner on their video card could record their favorite TV shows, compress them and watch them the next day on the train to work (or write a script that compresses and uplinks to the microdrive automatically...). Also, the Microdrives are interchangeable, so you have effectively unlimited storage (well it is limited by the size of your wallet of course).
If you ask me, this stuff's starting to get simply insane, if we can do this *now*, imagine a year, or even two years from now.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
With 64 MB of RAM festival could be ported to the thing.
Then any book on project Gutenberg could be read aloud.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
If I'm not mistaken, you can get one of those PC card expansion packs and add a 1GB IBM Microdrive, no? Surely, that's pretty sweet. Especially if you use it with your digital camera...
The iPaq is simply amazing to a guy whose first personal computer had 16K (kilo not mega) bytes of RAM and a 2mhz z80 processor...
Really, the wireless network is to slow for serious use, but works ok for email. And, 32 meg is not nearly enugh memory if you plan to use the machine for entertainment. And yeah, it runs DOOM pretty well.
StoneWolf
For some reason, I can't find the higher-end one on the site -- am I alone? With 64MB, this beats all but my most recent computer. Pop in my Merlin wireless card, and I can roam the city talking to myself all day? Excellent.
The way this post sounded, one would think this dude is a basehead on a binge or something. 64mb on your PC? Well for the price of that little toy you could jack your pc's mem up easily.
I never understood why one would rush out to buy the latest hardware or even software, especially when their brand spanking new, when as tech shows up, next month something more high powered is about to hit the big screen and so called "blow your mind." So why the big hooplah over this.
As you were
360 degrees of Karma
Will the same distribution of linux built for the lesser models also run on this one?? I suppose it might be too early to know for sure, but looking at the specifications, it should run just fine. Now if only they could put some more colors on that little screen......
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
A handheld doesn't NEED 64MB of RAM. That's just a coverup for poor programming!
TODO: Something witty here...
Compaq ipaq 3670 206MHZ 64MB Pocket PC Color