Does anyone know much about PDAs? i was a little late in the game with cell phones and I'm interested in having mobile internet access that is not laptop/wi-fi related.

I've got an XDA IIi, spud's got an Ipaq IIRC.

What do you want to know?

Truthfully I know very little about them. pretty much i just want to be able to email people (i'm not a really techno-savvy guy) while i'm on the go, and do some basic internet browsing--i guess i just want to know what make and model would be ideal for someone without much to spend. sorry if this is vague. but i'm a little clueless.

I have an Ipaq 5450 which is old now, but still ultra sweet in my opinion (it was top of its range, and has wifi, bluetooth... hell it even has a finger print recognition device built in ). It has no problems connecting to hotspots, not the ones i've tried.

Now as far as networking goes, you need an access point. Mine doesn't play ball very well with an ad-hoc network i setup at home, but at uni, I just turn on wifi and it finds it instantly. I load up IE, enter my login details and it connects no problem.

My main gripe is the input, its a tad slow if like me you type fast, and lots of crap. Its not ultra slow, but its annoying. Hand writing recognition is okay for the odd word, but if your sitting down and writing segments for a report, you need an addon keyboard.

There's the problem of the display size too, dead-donkey for example is not PDA friendly (that's fair to say on your pda too pca?). This will be the case for almost every website you'll visit regularly.

If you want net access you want to work with pda friendly, or xml meta tag sites. I'm working on RSS feeds for dead-donkey, they'll be there ultimately. RSS really helps things for pdas, if you connect, download all the feeds, then turn off wireless you can browse news offline, and save your battery.

Still my pda gets used every day, more so for music, task and appointment management than input and www surfing.

The real problem with wireless access devices is they EAT your batteries really fast, i don't know how long wifi lasts on my pda, but i suspect its a couple of hours before it runs dry.

My biggest gribe is that I can't find any java SDK and runtimes that seem to want to play with my ipaq, which i upgraded to windows Mobile 2003... can anyone help me with this if they have java installed?

Depends, if you want email and browsing you'll need either access to wireless connections all the time or a GPRS pda like the XDA series from o2.

The models you need to look at are the XDA IIi, Qtek 2020i, PDA2 or the qtek 4040, xda-IV, SPV M5000, mda-IV, imate 2005. I've no idea who in the states markets these phones, but as you can see from above each of the two models has lots of names dependent on the provider.

I love my phone / PDA though, it's fantastic and combined with tomtom and GPS is pretty much perfect

Dedicated PDAs tend to be a hell of a lot more powerful and feature rich, the downside is you don't get a phone and thusly not the same level of connectivity, and as such your liable to pay a lot more money (getting setup that is). Especially since the phone makers do everything in their power to sell the handsets.

I'd take a dedicated PDA though, that way i don't have to clog expensive devices around everywhere ie. when i'm pissed and its obviously more powerful.

If you intend to take it everywhere and need a phone, then i suggest a phone based one.

You might want to go out and buy a PDA magazine, there's lots of them available and they normally have tables of the best equipment and feature comparisons.

I'd dispute this in all honesty, the newer phone PDA's are just as powerful as the standalones, and due to the way that phone companies subsidise means you can get some real bargains.

Both the model above have got 520Mhz Intel Xscale processors 128 Mb ram/ rom and the XDA IV has a full qwerty keyboard and a 640x480 screen.

That fine, but you won't get my agreement on it. true, the newer phones are only relatively only 100-200mhz behind pdas, but the ones i've used often have pillaged OSs which is a crying shame, and sluggish response in contrast. I've only used a handful (damn was that a pun), but unfortunately, that includes the XDA II which is nice, but not the best pda out there i've used. I always assumed it was because of all the extra gubbins going on. The ram is generally much lower than standalones too, that might be where the problem lies.

It might be an unfair advantage because all the best pdas are made by better specialised companies though, but definitely no sale on that one. I'll probably not buy another pda after i finish uni, if i was going to at this point in time, its very doubtful it would be a pda-phone.

Keyboards are always nice, but it means they are nearly always 75-100% bigger than ones without. At one point i was comtemplating buying an external one. I have a thumbpad but its not that hot.

I have to say, i'm rather dissapointed with the pda scene as a whole, the cpus are slower than i was expecting (where did arm go? ), the input problem is still enourmous, and the battery life is still low. But then i have the same problems with laptops too.

I think you're a little behind the times there spud, taking the XDA IIi as the comparison :

CPU - Intel Xscale 520MHz
65,536 colour LCD @ 320 x 240
128 MB SDRAM, 128 MB ROM
Spb benchmark overall 1214
~?80 on contract

compared to the dell Axim x51, which has a simillar spec with a >100 Mhz faster 640Mhz processor, but half the ram and obviously no phone component. The Dell is running the newer Windows Mobile 5, and benchmarks at 335 overall (!), although in fairness this is due to WM5 writing to ROM all the time not RAM so comparing the x50 (same spec, older OS) which is a fairer comparison for the "standalone" PDAs that scores 1380.
The real kicker here is the cost the x51 costs ?376 and is only marginally faster (except on file system operations where it's ~25% of the speed)

Having said that I used the XDA IIs the other day and it was bloody horrible in comparison, beware that with Phone PDA's it's all sown to implementation, implement it well like the two models I quoted and it's all good, do it badly (like the XDA IIs, XDA II and earlier models) and they are appalling, slow and clunky.

Fair enough, I use mine for work, for travelling and as an occasional moview / mp3 player and as a phone and it fulfills all of those fuctions exceptionally well. If it wasn't for the phone part I would never have bothered, but now I'm sold

I wouldn't bother with a PDA with those little keyboards, although I do quite like the XDA IV, for me battery life is good enough at ~2 days average use and there are enough games and apps to keep me entertained although I rarely game on the XDA IIi as the "joypad" is bloody terrible

Compared with a dell axim i'd take a lump of coal I do not rate axims at all, very poor pdas imo.

ipaqs are the snizzle... there's not been one for a while, but they still are the best performing little buggers, of course PocketPcs too since palms are seriously turd.

As for battery life, when you do battery time you get the "never use/standby time" and the continous use time. I'm referring to the latter. How long does it last playing music/video si what i mean... they normally pack out within 6 hrs or so, wireless use saps it down to 3-4hrs.

i never play games on pdas. I do want to have programming functionality though and they need the ram and the processing power to run the apps i want.

I just bought another battery for my pda off ebay, this thread reminded me.

If someone gave me a free pda phone i wouldn't complain or anything, i'm just saying phone is of no baring to my decision so it would be the better ones. I wouldn't buy a Dell axim unless someone took hostages, and even then they'd have to kill a few before i bought one.

Sounds about right, depending on backlight obviously

I'm not sure i'd bother with a PDA without phone, weird how one man's meat... etc The reason being that there would be NO WAY I would carry round a Phone AND a PDA in conjuction with my wallet, keys and cash etc. it's just too much crap to carry round

isn't that much of a problem if you just buy a normal small phone, that's just a phone.

plus i bet people laugh at you when you talk into those things too... remember this site?
http://www.sidetalking.com/page-shirtless.html




btw, on note that isn't aimed at trying to get you really paranoid, i think we scared manofwar off

:LOL: Yeah I noticed that
You should see the nokia 7710 I'm using at the moment if you think talking into a PDA looks stupid