Customer Reviews
Great hardware, software works after some maintenance
A fine piece of hardware: small, light, good screen, excellent battery life, and does all the basic functions of a PDA (including internet, and Skype works reasonable well). The firmware needs an update to fix frequent crashes, but HP's tech support was great and helped me fix it in a few minutes.
The main defect is the Windows platform. The bundled software (IE, windows media, Word, Notes, etc) are ridiculously stripped down and quite useless in my opinion. If you've used Palm in the past, you'll wonder why Microsoft takes several minutes to Sync a couple of bytes of data with Outlook, or needs a restart every week or two even after all the fixes and updates, or can't let you password protect private records. Luckily I found excellent replacements for most of the software at handango.com/hp and opera.com for a total of about $50, and the machine is now very functional and I'm happy with it. Palm seems to have its own harware issues, so I don't know what's better or worse.
Overall, in an era when most electronic equipment is made in a big hurry and outsourced to the lowest bidder, this PDA does very well compared to others in its price range.
Stylus keeps falling out
Everytime I pull this out of my purse, I have to dig for the stylus. I had an older one that you had to push a button to release the stylus and it was never lost, but apparently they've removed that feature. Maybe it's just a ploy to get you to buy a ton of extra styluses.
Bad product
This is a great looking PDA. It just doesn't work. I'm on my second one now, and getting ready to send it back. The first one required daily removal and replacement of the battery to get it to turn on, required 2-3 hard resets per day, and it wouldn't sync with my desktop. The second one requires 1-3 soft resets per day, takes 30 seconds or more just to pull up my task list, keeps forgetting to filter my task list to active items, won't hold as much data from Outlook as my 5 year old 8mb Palm Vx, and won't allow most programs to save to the SD card (and since my calendar alone fills up the base memory, I can't do much at all with the PDA). I'd strongly encourage you to look elsewhere for a PDA.
