The nice touches aren’t confined solely to hardware, however. It helps to push even the most sluggish of applications along at a fair old lick and searches complete as swiftly as I’ve seen on any Windows Mobile 6 device.Ī dual SD/CF card slot on the top of the PDA means there’s a wide range of potential expansion options available, and a battery with a huge capacity of 2,200mAh ensures that plugging the iPAQ into the mains is a thing you only need to do once every few days. Underneath it all is a highly capable processor: a 624MHz Marvell PXA310 processor backed with 128MB of RAM and a generous 256MB of ROM. Press and hold the Start button, for example, and you’ll get to the Today screen do the same with the ok button and the screen rotates. Other nice touches include a simple, yet flexible button panel below the iPAQ’s lovely screen: four shortcut buttons (including Start and ok) flank a five way d-pad and each of these can be held down to launch alternative, useful tasks. It’s weighty, not plasticky, and precise to use too. ![]() Slip the stylus out from its home in the top right-hand corner of the device and you begin to feel spoiled. Better still, the screen is visible even outdoors. Hook it up to the Internet via Bluetooth or the iPAQ’s 214 Wi-Fi connection, and even browsing the Internet becomes viable – as long as you download a decent web browser first, that is.īuilt into the chassis above the screen, is an ambient light sensor that will adjust the brightness of the display depending on your surroundings, boosting it in bright daylight and toning it down under dimmer conditions. You can squeeze lots of detail on a screen this big and Google Maps is a joy to look at and use. It’s bright too, with vibrant colours and has an impressively high resolution of 640 x 480. The screen measures a huge 4in diagonally and this fills the iPAQ’s ample chassis from edge to edge. Turn it on and the luxury feel continues. Like a well-tailored suit, it has an understated, yet very expensive-feel. It also looks and feels as luxurious to use as one of the famous stately cars, with a rear panel clad in thick, rubber-coated plastic, sides that are wrapped in gunmetal-silver and a front fascia finished in piano black. This is truly a Rolls-Royce among PDAs: it’s large and very, very wide and at 76 x 126 x 16mm (WxHxD) it’s a good centimetre broader and taller than my TyTN II. If that’s the road you want to go down, the iPAQ 214 should certainly be on your short list. Not everyone wants to carry their office email and calendar around with them all the time – especially at the weekend or on holidays – a reminder of the treats in store when they return to the office, so why not split the two features in two? Why not keep the phone a phone and reserve the rest for a separate device? ![]() Perhaps that was the thinking behind HP’s latest PDA, the iPAQ 214. Sometimes you don’t need every bell and whistle to make a usable product. Why would anyone want to carry a separate device for your contacts, email and calendar when everything – and more – can be squeezed into one super-capable, pocketable device?Īs the success of the iPhone proves, however, being able to squeeze the fastest technology and the most features into a device is not always, well, everything. And it’s easy to see why it’s slowly but surely going the way of the dodo. The onward march of smartphone technology has rendered the once potent PDA a sad and forlorn figure.
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