Tuesday, June 24, 2003
HP iPAQ 2215 - The New Shining Star in the Pocket PC Galaxy?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 01:10 AM
Ladies and gentlemen, before I slip into a coma at 2:10 AM, I'm going to hit the SUBMIT button and post this review. I'm about 28 hours late (I was hoping to originally publish this at 10 PM on Sunday night), but I hope you'll agree it was worth the wait. I've had the iPAQ 2215 for about a week now, and I've been using it as much as possible - this is truly an impressive device! It's also the first Pocket PC to win a very unique award from Pocket PC Thoughts...I hope you enjoy the review. Comments & questions welcome!
UPDATE: There's a reason why publishing reviews at 2 AM isn't a good idea. I left out an entire section on the screen! The review has been updated, and several errors have been fixed.
My goal in this review is to talk about the things that you might not already know, rather than cover all the specs in detail. The iPAQ 2215 is the first Pocket PC 2003 to hit the streets, equipped with a 400mHZ Intel PXA255 XScale CPU, a 100Mhz system bus (not 200Mhz as I had originally thought), 64 MB of RAM, 32 MB of Flash-ROM, a CompactFlash slot, and a SDIO slot. The full specs can be found in this PDF file.
First Impressions
Figure 1: The packaging and first look at the iPAQ 2215.
My first impressions as I unpacked the box were excellent – quality packaging with a catchy design. Upon opening the box, I was surprised (and impressed) to see Outlook 2002 (XP) versus the normal Outlook 2000 we're used to seeing. Perhaps with the imminent release of Office 2003, the prices on 2002 have dropped. Regardless, it's nice of HP to give their customers the most current version of Outlook rather than an old one. Well done HP!
The packaging contained the usual assortment of accessories: a stylus, the cradle, that silly adaptor you need to plug power into the device (a pet peeve of mine), and a ho-hum case. I know you’re never going to get a Vaja-class case with a Pocket PC, but this case is utterly boring and barely functional. I’m sure there’s a way to make a cheap, but reasonably stylish case. Doesn’t HP have all those smart case engineers? ;-)
Figure 1a: The silly power dongle. Having one more part to lose is never a good thing.
Figure 1b: The utterly boring black case. You can do better HP, I know you can!
UPDATE: There's a reason why publishing reviews at 2 AM isn't a good idea. I left out an entire section on the screen! The review has been updated, and several errors have been fixed.
My goal in this review is to talk about the things that you might not already know, rather than cover all the specs in detail. The iPAQ 2215 is the first Pocket PC 2003 to hit the streets, equipped with a 400mHZ Intel PXA255 XScale CPU, a 100Mhz system bus (not 200Mhz as I had originally thought), 64 MB of RAM, 32 MB of Flash-ROM, a CompactFlash slot, and a SDIO slot. The full specs can be found in this PDF file.
First Impressions
Figure 1: The packaging and first look at the iPAQ 2215.
My first impressions as I unpacked the box were excellent – quality packaging with a catchy design. Upon opening the box, I was surprised (and impressed) to see Outlook 2002 (XP) versus the normal Outlook 2000 we're used to seeing. Perhaps with the imminent release of Office 2003, the prices on 2002 have dropped. Regardless, it's nice of HP to give their customers the most current version of Outlook rather than an old one. Well done HP!
The packaging contained the usual assortment of accessories: a stylus, the cradle, that silly adaptor you need to plug power into the device (a pet peeve of mine), and a ho-hum case. I know you’re never going to get a Vaja-class case with a Pocket PC, but this case is utterly boring and barely functional. I’m sure there’s a way to make a cheap, but reasonably stylish case. Doesn’t HP have all those smart case engineers? ;-)
Figure 1a: The silly power dongle. Having one more part to lose is never a good thing.
Figure 1b: The utterly boring black case. You can do better HP, I know you can!
