Mobile Ministry Magazine

Part one of a review of the migration to an iPaq from a Palm Tungsten E2 by A.Jay Sutton

I’ve been disappointed with Palm as a company recently. Their level of service especially when dealing with warranty issues has fallen off so sharply that despite my 8-year love affair with Palm in all their various flavors, I’ve faced some difficult choices recently and made a decision that Palm is no longer a company I’m interested in doing business with. The quality of the devices seems to have gone the way of their support in my experience over the past year, and for all the heartache I’ve had to deal with trying to get devices replaced under warranty, I’ve decided with much regret to part company with Palm.

Early in January I moved away from the Palm platform in favor of a Windows Mobile device. My device of choice was an iPAQ rx1955, chosen for its size and the fact that it has integrated WiFi.

I thought by now that I should take a moment to share a more comprehensive review of my thoughts on the iPAQ rx1955.

I'm getting along with the iPAQ a lot better than I anticipated by this point. I've been using the device now for not quite a month and I'm getting exponentially more comfortable with it.

I've recently acquired a used keyboard and am using that extensively, which goes a LONG way to making the device more practical especially as it relates to wireless things like e-mail. One thing I especially like about the keyboard as opposed to Palm’s universal wireless keyboard is that it doesn’t require batteries, and the battery drain on the iPAQ seems minimal

I'm doing things on it that I never did on my Palm, especially the wireless stuff, and that's kind of weird and different, but I'm liking it a lot. I’m using Hotmail more and more and Microsoft has a new thing they call the Live Mail (currently in beta), which is quite nice.

With regard to web surfing, I’ve found that while it does actually pull up most web sites I try to hit, it’s remarkably more practical if you stick with the mobile portals of which there are a number from which to choose. This I found to be true using the WiFi card on my Tungsten E2 also, but I pretty seriously underestimated the usefulness of the wireless connectivity.

PIM functionality I find to be pretty kludgy, and trying to use MS Money on the iPAQ... well, the functionality is considerably less than what I was used to using Ultrasoft’s Pocket Money on my Palm. But I can enter transactions when I’m out shopping, and they do sync with MS Money when I get home, so I can get by with that, even if it’s a little bit of an adjustment.

With calendars and contacts, I find I'm relying on the iPAQ as more of a way to look and see what's there as opposed to managing the whole calendar creating appointments and managing recurring tasks and what not. Creation of new contacts is also not as smooth as it is on the Palm for me but to be honest, I never found it all that smooth on the Palm, I’d just gotten used to the way Palm wanted things and would always go back to Palm Desktop or Outlook to straighten things out.

Mostly, I do all the appointment and contact creation in Outlook, and the iPAQ is just a convenient way to carry it around sort of.

So I'm using the device as much as I used my Palm or more, and relying on it every bit as much, but I'm using it in a different ways.