Mobile Ministry Magazine

Part 2 of 3 of A.Jay's iPaq review. Read Part 1

I’ve found that programs for the iPAQ are considerably more expensive than they are for Palm and because of that, I’ve not been using as many third party apps, which is kind of good anyway, because I like to get used to the iPAQ in it’s native form before I go tearing it up with a bunch of third party stuff. But among the third party apps that I’ve seen, a co-worker of mine compressed the movie “Office Space” into divx and put it on a 128 megabyte SDIO card and it played wonderfully in landscape mode. It was like having a little movie theater in the palm of your hand!

But to be fair, having been a dyed-in-the-wool Palm advocate for so many years, I’ve amassed a rather large number of third party apps and have carried them with me from one Palm to the next over the years as one dies and another takes it’s place. I wonder how much luck I’d have trying to use a “naked” Palm now too cause there are very many “must have” apps for it that I put on a Palm before it goes in my pocket the first time.

I don’t care for the way that iPAQ uses memory. I’m still a bit foggy on that. Unlike a Palm, apps actually stay running when you switch to another task, and actually I guess the Palm did too, but this takes away system resources. Frequently when you see you’re getting low on resources you have to tap the icon of the memory chip and go to the “running programs” tab and “stop all programs” which seems a little odd. But you get used to it. It’s Windows after all…

For Bibles I’m still using Laridian, although I’ve tried QuickVerse, but it wasn’t fast enough. That could simply be my bias for Laridian Bibles coming out however. The program Memorize, also from Laridian, works considerably different than it does on the Palm and that’s taken a bit of getting used to.

I love the fact that each of the four hardware buttons has a “press and hold” feature. Like if you press and hold the calendar button, it changes the screen from portrait to landscape. Pressing and holding contacts by default launches ActiveSync, Mail, launches Windows Media Player and the wireless button launches IE. I’ve found a couple of those to be very helpful.

Navigation is generally not as easy as it is on the Palm in many respects. I like the fact that when you turn on the Palm it comes up to a main screen with icons on it and you can launch whichever program you choose. With the iPAQ the opening screen is something akin to the agenda screen in Palm’s calendar, which has some benefits of it’s own. It’s nice to be able to see outstanding tasks and appointments in a clickable format on the screen when you first power on, but to get to any other applications you have to navigate for it, and they aren’t always very easy to find.

The other sticky point with the iPAQ and me is the way you move things around. Generally you have to cut and paste, but it seems you can’t do that right from the programs group, you have to first go into file explorer and find the shortcuts to the programs you want moved here or there. And then it seems to give you warnings that moving a program might render it inoperable, so I guess you aren’t actually moving shortcuts at all. I may not have said that very clearly, my lack of familiarity with these devices is evident in the fact that I haven’t learned all the right lingo yet.

When it’s all said and done, I think that if PIM functionality is all that you’re after, you still cannot beat the simplicity and ease of use of a Palm. If you’re looking for something more like a mobile office, where connectivity is a big issue (especially wireless connectivity) and you’re looking to do more with Word and Excel documents, I’m thinking I’d favor the iPAQ. And document management is something I hadn’t addressed to this point, but support for native Word documents and Excel spreadsheets is an absolute dream and isn’t something that should be glossed over the way I’m doing here. That deserves some serious accolades.

Seamless integration with Outlook (including e-mail if you choose to do that, which I don’t because of the volume of Spam I get, I stick with web based e-mail like Hotmail and Gmail) is very nice also and is also one of iPAQ’s assets.

Battery life is something that I should comment on also. The iPAQ can’t stand up to my Tungsten E2 in the battery life department, and you won’t want to go far without a charger. Although there are extended batteries available, they add considerable bulk to the device.