Info on the New iPAQ H3800

Jason Dunn sent us to a link on his site about the new new iPaq which is due out relatively soon. Aesthetic changes, more memory, and I assume Linux will run on it as well or better then the existing models.

Comments

Moans for casio...where's the decent graphics?

[dasmegabyte]

I'm a proud owner of a Cassiopeia E-100, the first colour handheld ever. It's aging quite nicely -- the processor is only 133 MHz, but that's MIPS and not this cheap-slow-crunches-x86-code-easily StrongARM BS that looks nice on benchmarks but can't feed graphics to save its life. The problem is that the E-100 is stuck in time, there's not really much development going on for Windows CE 2.11 and the developers who used to give us a hand-me-down build when compiling for 3.0 usually just blow us off entirely. Some of the new graphics APIs, which don't really have a parellel in Pocket Linux are very swift and are allowing handhelds to really blow up the market with features like full motion video, great VNC support, and really bitchin' audio interfaces.

What, say those of you still stuck in the dark ages of the "i can do anything a pencil and paper can do, only 500 times more expensive" PalmOS, why would you want motion video? Well, because it's terribly useful for making a lot of the things you want a palmtop for more descriptive. Take, for example, the latest topographical software that comes with TopoUSA (a maptech product I think). It can display a 3d gradient of an area. Not too useful? I beg to differ. There have been a number of times up in the 'dacks where I've bivouaced up a mountain and come down on the totally wrong side. I can't read contour lines for shit, because I don't have a degree in geography. With the isometric view that this topo software provides, i could just input the direction i was facing, and scroll until the terrain matched what I was seeing (no, GPS wouldn't be useful here, because it would be at least ten meters off...and in a land of overgrown trails and thousand foot cliffs, ten meters is a lot). There are lots of other uses for a decent graphics API, too, such as video conferencing and web browsing.

However, this new iPaq still has the same crummy 12 bit downsampled (meaning that the proc takes time to shave off the extra 4 bits) screen as its predessors. So while the processor is faster, the display (which is the biggest bottleneck, pocketpcpassion.com had a benchmark showing that even the E-100 could beat the 32 meg iPaq to the screen using the old graphics APIs) is slow as it ever was. Kind of a shame, considering all the features...like putting a big engine, big gas tank, great stereo, leather seats, GPS and handheld telephone into a nice little lightweight chassis, and then gearing it for torque.