HP iPAQ 111 Review - End of The Road For PDAs?

One of the more recent personal organizers, the HP iPAQ 111 is stylish, and was one of the early adopters in this space for WiFi . WiFi connectivity lets you remain connected to your contacts and calendars and other daily tasks while on the road. The iPAQ 111 lets you surf the internet and read some emails via a wireless network connection, and it has Bluetooth connectivity, and it uses Windows Mobile 6.

Review:

Overall, this PDA is good. It is reliable, wireless capabilities are excellent, long battery life, USB 2.0 connection, and the screen is bright. It includes a microphone, rear speaker and a 3.5 headphone jack. It takes a long time to learn how to synchronize via wireless or cable connection from the windows mobile application. Bluetooth capabilities are fantastic. If the area you are in does not have a WiFi hotspot, you can connect your HP iPAQ 111 to the Bluetooth and get instant access. If you have a cell phone, you can share ringtones, pictures and other files. It is always nice to share files and browse files whenever you want.

What It Should Have Had:

In this day and age where cell phones can get a gigabyte of RAM, 64 MB is downright primitive. Having only a quarter gig of storage space is awful, but remediable with an SD or SDHC card. We really really hated the volume controls for the headphones. That has to be fixed ASAP, because it's way too granular. It's either inaudible or rattles your fillings loose.

All PDA keyboards are compromises between size and usability; the HPs is decent, but expect to take some time to adjust to it. Mating a Wireless Bluetooth keyboard is probably wise if you intend to do serious document creation on this.

HP iPAQ 111 Key Features:

*Windows Mobile 6.0

*WiFi connectivityy

*Edit Word Documents

*Sync Calendar and Emails from your Desktop

*A large scale processor improvement - it's now 624 MHz. It still has only 256MB Flash ROM; 64 MB RAM

Pros and Cons of HP iPAQ 111:

Pros:

*624 MHz processor is a welcome improvement

*Excellent, top of the line Bluetooth, capabilities.

*Battery life is superb

*Well supported by HP

*Automatic brightness adjustments

Cons:

*Not suited to multi-tasking; running more than one application at a time is a serious performance hog.

*The screen has pixels that are so small as to be unreadable for some

*If you hands are oily or sweaty, the PDA will be smudged

*Speaker is located at the back of the PDA; the sound is not very pleasant

*Volume control is a disaster.

The PDA market is dying out, and the HP iPAQ 111 is one of the last real PDAs out there that hasn't been morphed into a smart phone. It's got a three year old user interface, and while the hardware has been updated, it's still trying to be too much of a computer on too weak of a CPU. If you already use an iPAQ, this is a worthwhile model to pick up; at some point, this kind of device will be entirely driven by cell phones and mobile internet devices.

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