iPAQ 3800 In Photos

okiwan points to this review of the H3800, the newest rev of the handheld iPAQs, writing "New pics of the ipaq 38xx. hella neat." The photos also give a good size comparison to other handhelds, including ones you may not have heard of before.

Comments

hmm

[Ravagin]

Whenever I see the phrase "hella neat," all I can think is "What? Hello Kitty? Huh?"

That aside, the iPaq is pretty sexy - and a good device, if your tastes run that way. Me, all I want is everything my Palm IIIxe (still the best Palm-made PalmOS device out there) gives me - addresses, calendar, Rogue, and RTF word processing. (rock on, Palm Portable Keyboard!)

The only new device I've seriously considered is the ravishingly sexy HandEra 330. Yee-ow.

Oh no, here come the PocketPC users, eeeee....

Thumbing - Keyboards

[kc0dby]

So when the heck is Mavis beacon going to get off her butt and teach me how to type with my thumbs? Seriously, maybe this new thumbing keyboard style that has emerged will open the door to a new keyboard layout. QWERTY is just about as bad for thumbing as it is for typing. The only thing that's easy to type on QWERTY is the word QWERTY. Between the two-way pager, the bluetooth devices, and now this, I think my poor thumbs are going to start longing for "the old days" when all they had to do was occasionally pick up a writing instrument or fork..

What I'm waiting for in a PDA...

[Pete (big-pete)]

I'm waiting for someone to bring out a PDA and mobile phone combined...but wait - not in the style of the Nokia communicator or many of the hybrids (although the 9210 is a nice bit of kit, which is what I use at the moment). I want the GSM technology to be built into the palm sized device, but I want a pen sized/shaped unit to use as the phone component. Communication between the phone component and the base phone could be done via buetooth. Much the way the ericsson headsets operate now - with headset -> PDA instead of headset -> mobile phone.

Also I would expect such a device to have voice recognition, so calls can be made entirely with the headset, without having to pull up the PDA to specify the call details.

Another thing that of course makes or breaks PDAs is the syncronisation software - there is no excuse for sloppy code here - and I really think that this is one area that Nokia haven't done so well with their communicators. I have about 1500 contacts, but once I start trying to syncronise more than about 900 it becomes unbearably slow. come on - why aren't the contact databases transferred as a file to the PC, syncronised on the PC, and thne the files should be transferred back - the PC is vastly more powerful than the device, so it should be doing the donkey work!

I think that the iPAQ's have fairly good syncronisation software though (AvantGO is quite impressive I understand), and this is a point that anyone else developing a PDA needs to bear in mind. the PC interface matters!

Bah - just a few random(ish) thoughts anyway...

-- Pete.