Ipaq Vs. Nokia Showdown

In the red corner - the battered but always ready Ipaq 1930. Nearly four years old and onto his third battery, he's handled a workload of blog post starts, calendar details and to-do lists with less than a dozen soft resets. In the blue corner, the sleek, new and very cocky Nokia e65 with ambitions to push the elderly Pocket PC into permanent retirement. He's got a camera, voice recording, Symbian task management and scorns the use of the old fashioned stylus. Does he have what it takes to manage the ever complex and befuddling world of the South Australian primary school coordinator?

I am a terrible diary user. Being bad at writing what I had to do in a paper based diary forced me to buy the HP Ipaq nearly four years ago. I figured it might make task management fun and then I wouldn't forget so many deadlines. Well, it turned out to be my first dabble in mobile computing and my Ipaq is now the equivalent of my old VL Commodore with over 200,000 k's on the clock. Still does things as well as the day I bought it but of course, the new models have more features and do fancier stuff.

I also got sick of having two devices to lug around - together, my old Nokia mobile and then the Pocket PC meant something fell out of my pocket whenever I wanted change from my wallet. I started with one of those PDA belt clips but I broke that pretty quickly. So this year when I decided that my mobile "brick" needed to go, I figured that maybe a decent mobile phone with the right feature set would be the right move and I could retire the faithful Ipaq. I went shopping, but being a bit of a tightwad I wanted the best phone for the lightest plan and that's why I ended up with the e65. I know that North Americans have been drooling over the iPhone and the iTouch but a recent post from Leonard Low has confirmed that there are deficiencies in their offerings. And it's a moot point because these products aren't available to regular Aussie consumers at the moment. I looked at a Palm Treo but there was no plan here that was below A$80 a month and the guy at AllPhones said that upgrading the software on them was a pain in the proverbial.

The e65 is a pretty good phone for the money but how does it stack up as a replacement for the faithful Ipaq? Well, I now have an anywhere anytime camera which can be pretty handy - photos aren't too bad - so there's one advantage straightaway. The onboard miniSD card means there is stacks of room for data and files. I can view documents, spreadsheets, slideshows but I can't create or edit any of these. Probably just as well - I am a lousy texter and it takes me ages to do the simplest of messages. The wireless capability is a big advantage and I could add a foldout keyboard (a la Mike Seyfang) and create via the web if I so desired. But opportunities and reasons to do so will be few and far between, so checking twitter without booting up my laptop over breakfast is convenient if not entirely necessary. The calendar and tasks functions are very similar and eventually can sync to Outlook if I ever get organised to have that up and running on my work laptop. That was a lot easier to run on the Pocket PC.

What do I still need from my old faithful that the Nokia can't? I still like starting blog posts using Pocket Word during opportune moments and inputting data is much easier using text recognition rather than my clumsy thumb keyboarding skills. But it's much less necessary to have the Ipaq close at hand with me at all times during the work day. So as I'm using it less, I now have to consider whether to purchase a new sync'n'charge cable as I killed my last one the other week and a new battery pack as the current one seems to lose 15% of its charge within the first ten minutes.

The e65 has more capability than what I'm prepared to pay for - Skype, 3G web access, Foxtel - but it's probably the winner for the moment. It's not a knockout by any stretch.

My mobile learning journey continues.

Technorati tags:

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

4 thoughts on “Ipaq Vs. Nokia Showdown

  1. Sue Waters

    I personally think you will be disappointed if you don’t stay with a PDA. You are so used to using the touchscreen I just can’t see you being happy with a smartphone. My suggestion is there are some really cool HTC coming onto the market that will probably be more suited to what you are after.

    Sue

    Reply
  2. warrick

    I just got a Nokia (N73) which syncs with my Outlook calendar via bluetooth and that is 90% of the use I had for my old Ipaq. It has a good camera (check out N73 shots on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/nokia/n73/ ) a voice recorder, video recorder and is a phone as well. I miss OneNote mobile for those quick meeting notes but I’m happier carrying around one device. About the only time I carry around the Ipaq now is to use Excel to mark off my tute group attendance in assembly!

    Reply
  3. David

    Graham, I am an avowed iPAQ fan, I have the HX series with WiFi. this enables me, using Skype to have almost all of the functionality of a phone. With my Skype in and out account I can use the PDA as a phone and can send texts too. Keep the PDA close!

    Reply
  4. Sue Waters

    Agreed stick to PDA but am over IPAQ as we have so many at work. Which one to choose if not an IPAQ well ROFL lots of people have had lots of problems with lots of the other brands.

    Good luck
    Sue

    Reply

Leave a Reply to David Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *