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TPGGTR Part 3: Daily Life With the iPaq
September 17, 2001
It’s been just over a week now, and daily life with the iPaq has been really interesting. Since there is no perfect device, at least not yet, there are some things that I really love about it, and some things that I hate.
Let’s start with the loves. First, the screen— it’s simply incredible. my eyes aren’t all that great, and the iPaq’s screen is a joy to behold. Without going into all the technical details, let me just say that it is bright and clear, and the higher resolution makes things much easier to read. The backlight is super bright, almost painfully so, but once I turned that down a bit it was just perfect. Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the Palm and the PocketPC is that there is no dedicated data entry area- the onscreen keyboard pops up when necessary. That leaves lots of extra room for text while reading an ebook, or for more visible lines when I’m looking for a particular contact.
Another love is the voice recording feature. Never having really used one before, I didn’t know what I was missing. It’s great for quick reminders when I don’t want to go through the hassle of entering in a formal appointment, or if I want to jot down a phone number or driving directions quickly so I won’t forget anything. It’s a real time saver, but I do wish that the quality was a bit better. I get quite a few breakfast cereal sounds coming out of my speaker during playback- you know, snap, crackle, and pop- but I’ve been told this is more a quality control issue with the iPaq than any widespread problem with the PocketPC hardware. Since I don’t have wide experience in this area, it’s hard to tell if this is the case or not.
Perhaps the best thing of all though, is one of the new features in PocketPC 2002— Block Recognizer. While they certainly can’t call it Graffiti support, that’s what it boils down to in real life. As a Palm user, I don’t have to figure out how to use the letter recognizer or Calligrapher or resign myself to hunting and pecking on the little onscreen keyboard- I can use almost every single Graffiti stroke, including punctuation and numbers. The only one I’ve found that doesn’t work is the letter “y” and I believe that is because I normally use an alternative stroke for that one. Block Recognizer’s importance to Palm users simply can’t be overstated- this one feature is what has made it possible for me to even look at the iPaq as an everyday device.
Next I’ll move on to PocketOutlook, which is both a love and a hate. I love the multiple category support for appointments and contacts, as well as the ability to add attendees to meetings. That really helps me to organize people and events, and offers more viewing options as well. Scheduling an appointment, while not as quick and easy as it is on a Palm, isn’t as painful as I thought that it would be. But the hourglass appears often, which is a mjaor annoyance and something of a mystery to me— the iPaq has a 206 MHz StrongARM processor, the Palm m505 only a 33 MHz Dragonball.
Another major concern for me is battery life. I’ve heard for quite a long time now that the battery life on the iPaq is simply abysmal and is prone to dying at just the wrong second. I really haven’t been able to test this in a scientific way; I do know that the battery does seem to drain significantly faster than the one in my m505. I didn’t use the iPaq at all this weekend, after fully charging it on Friday afternoon. When I checked this morning, the battery was down to about 60%, which was quite surprising. I can’t run the same test on my 505- there hasn’t been a two day stretch yet in which I didn’t use it extensively! The iPaq hasn’t died on me yet though, and it seems to charge up pretty quickly.
My last concern is in regards to size/weight of the device. Since we’re talking about mobile technology here. it’s very important that the device be very small and light, and easy to carry. You can enter volumes of information about your appointments, tasks, contacts, and your movie collection into your handheld, but it doesn’t mean a thing if you never carry it around because it weighs you down too much. The iPaq is an engineering marvel, especially considering that gorgeous screen, but it does come at a price- it is larger and heavier than the Palm m505, but not by all that much. It is a bit longer, and about twice as thick. I haven’t weighed it personally, but it’s easy to tell that the iPaq is heavier. It still fits in a pants pocket though, if not a shirt pocket, and of course it fits in my purse. So carrying around something a bit bigger than my m505 is easy enough to do.
But is it worth it? Is daily life with the iPaq significantly better than daily life with my Palm m505? It would have to be, in order for me to give any thought at all to a potential switch. I have a lot invested in the Palm OS platform, but I, like several other power users in the community, are looking at the PocketPC because we simply want the best handheld experience possible. I’m going to keep trying out the iPaq for a few more days, and then let all of you know what I decide.
