Business PDA, business price, ALMOST all you need

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good suite of connectivity options builtin, excellent specifications, stable platform

Cons: Battery life poor, no Compact Flash, Wifi throughput too low

The Bottom Line: 
So near yet so far, this has all the possibilities yet just misses hitting the spot. Get rid of SD, build in Compact Flash, boost the Wifi

Author's Review
This iPAQ is tantalisingly close to what is needed by the business or personal user but misses out on a few issues.

PRO's
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Integrated Bluetooth and Wifi provide the necessary backbone of connectivity that is essential in the corporate and personal space.

Backward compatability with "old" expansion jackets means not having to through away your investment.

Replaceable batteries in both the iPAQ as well as new expansion jackets allows for practical extended use away from mains power.

Built in SDIO slot allows for non jacket expansion (see CON'S).

Built in fingerprint reader really does provide in depth security of data, particularily useful for corporates.

17 MB of non volatile memory for data backup is VERY useable

CON'S
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SDIO is still a maturing technology and not as versatile as Compact Flash YET. Built in CF as opposed to SD would be a better idea right now. As it is to use a CF card you have to add an expansion jacket and this increases form size unacceptably.

Wifi connection and network setup remains as bizarre and cryptic as ever. It is almost unusable in most everyday usage and needs an add on such as Cirond's PocketWinc to make it practically useable.

Wifi strength and more importantly network throughput is slow. Applying the patch ROM update 27674 helped but still when I have an 11 Mb network connection I'd like to be able to reach at least 25% of that

Battery life is still a weak area and even the addition of warm swap batteries is a band aid not a fix. Keep your charger handy if you want more than a days full usage.

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To round up

I use 2 iPAQ's one with MS, one with Linux I have loaded for specialised security applications. The platform is sound, stable but still no quite there. Battery life remains a problem, the SD slot is a nice not a must, Wifi throughput remains not a good as it could be. This last problem may be a result of using the ATMEL builtin Wifi as I get better throughput using an external PC-Card wifi adapter.