Log in

View Full Version : Government Computer News tests 5 PDA's


Ed Hansberry
06-07-2002, 06:35 PM
<a href="http://www.gcn.com/21_11/reviews/18661-1.html">http://www.gcn.com/21_11/reviews/18661-1.html</a><br /><br />We must not have any governmental readers because as far as I know, we've never had a submission from this online site, which is also distributed in paper form. In fact, that is where I got it - my father-in-law saw a copy in his office and noticed an iPAQ as he flipped through it and let me read it.<br /><br />Anyway, they took 5 PDA's, an iPAQ 3870, Jornada 565, Clie NR70V, IBM Workpad C505 (think Palm M505) and Casio BE-300, and put them through their test lab. One interesting test was their battery drain test. After three hours of continuous use, not specified as to what that is, but assume it is the same for all thus putting them on equal ground, they see what the battery level is. Of course, the Jornada romped with 75% life left. Woohoo! But this was interesting. The C505/M505? 50%. I thought those things lasted 3 weeks or something. <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif" /> And the Clie? Fuggedaboudit. 10% left. I guess all those pixels really drain it.<br /><br />I was finally happy to see an independent test with the following quote. "The usual criticism of the Compaq iPaq Pocket PC H3870 is its steep $600 price tag and similarly expensive peripherals. Although $600 sounds like a lot for a digital organizer, it&amp;#8217;s not too much for a good handheld computer." <b>Exactly!</b> And when all was said and done, it was one of two "Readers Choices." The Jornada got the other. So, why didn't they like the new super-flip-with-the-built-in-keyboard-and-camera-and-you-have-to-love-my-screen Clie? Pics were low quality, and it tried to do too much with low memory (16MB, the max that Palm OS4 can address) and a weak processor - which is the 66MHz Dragonball - the fastest PalmOS processor right now. Look for some righteous hardware from Sony when OS5 releases and allows StrongARM/X-Scale processors. The 505 got bad marks simply because of its price. For a few bucks more, you can get an iPAQ, or you should save a few bucks and get an M130 or M125. And the BE-300? Well, that is just embarrassing. <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/images/smiles/icon_redface.gif" />

Ben
06-07-2002, 06:43 PM
A Type II CompactFlash expansion pack is $50, a PC Card expansion slot is $200 and a PCMCIA expansion slot $150.

:?: :?: :?: :?: :?:

So what do I get if I pay $50 more for my PC-Card expansion slot over my PCMCIA expansion slot? :)

Ed Hansberry
06-07-2002, 07:17 PM
So what do I get if I pay $50 more for my PC-Card expansion slot over my PCMCIA expansion slot? :)

I saw that. I wonder if the $200 one is the new PC Card Plus with the removable battery?

Sven Johannsen
06-07-2002, 07:40 PM
I looked at the PDF chart. I wonder how they got that Microdrive in the iPaq's SD slot, and why they couldn't find anything bigger than a 64M CF card for the Jornada :?:

Don't know how long ago this was written but the publish date was 5/20/02. Guess we've come a long way from the 32M SDand 32M CF cards that were all that were available way back then. He was able to come up with a 128M Memory Stick though. :?

Ed Hansberry
06-07-2002, 07:57 PM
I looked at the PDF chart. I wonder how they got that Microdrive in the iPaq's SD slot, and why they couldn't find anything bigger than a 64M CF card for the Jornada :?:
I didn't notice that, but I bet it came from the OEM web sites. I haven't checked recently, but 2 months ago 64MB was the biggest CF you could buy from HP and Compaq, while Sony sells the 128MS on their site. As for the 1GB MD, well, that was on Compaq's site too. You do need a $35 CF adapter though.

shockwave
06-07-2002, 08:07 PM
8)
I wouldn't say that about government employees. There are about 6 of us here (a unnamed DoD facility) where I'm at that check your site at least twice a day. This is actually our main source of information and new software for our iPAQ's.

Ed Hansberry
06-07-2002, 08:15 PM
8)
I wouldn't say that about government employees. There are about 6 of us here (a unnamed DoD facility) where I'm at that check your site at least twice a day. This is actually our main source of information and new software for our iPAQ's.

:lol: Ok, then you aren't reading gcn.com. :lol:

Timothy Rapson
06-08-2002, 02:25 AM
As a former subscriber to GCN I just want to point out that they are idiots. Complete idiots.

I work at the Post Office and they spend more money on less working technology than you could possibly imagine. Last year they got HP 700s (?Ok what was last years model of the HP clamshell?) My guess is that with the cards, software, special multiple unit cradels, they had $1500 into each one. They used them for one month and sent them to the regional office and auctioned them off for $75 apiece. None of the supervisors really knew how to use them anyway, except maybe to surf the Web for Porn when they were supposed to be doing real work.

GCN! Indeed.

Sorry, for the rant, I just have to be honest about technology in the government sector. It ain't pretty.

dochall
06-08-2002, 02:28 AM
The battery test is an interesting one. Personal Computer World (UK) did a PDA issue a few months ago. If memory server the results of the Pocket PC's were within 5% of the colour palms.

This really is something that could do with being provided to the general population to counter that 'a palm battery has a half life of 15000 years' nonsense that still gets put about.

JimV
06-08-2002, 03:17 AM
Jason,

Maybe someone should send this article to that Stats guy from Gartner that spoke at the PocketPCSummit...... Price... Battery life.... :wink:

Rob Alexander
06-08-2002, 05:47 AM
This guy's pretty scary. How could you spend time doing a thorough review like this and get so many things wrong?

"A Type II CompactFlash expansion pack is $50, a PC Card expansion slot is $200 and a PCMCIA expansion slot $150. " Already commented on, but do you trust the opinion of someone who thinks that PC Card and PCMCIA are different things?

Regarding the HP, "The built-in Type I CompactFlash slot can expand the RAM to 64M". Throughout the article he keeps saying that the flash memory cards increase the RAM in the device. That's pretty basic.

Regarding the Sony, "Although Sony chose the 66-MHz Motorola DragonBall Super VZ processor instead of the 33-MHz version in other Palm OS PDAs, it still fell short of handling multitasking with digital pictures. " Well, yeah, you could put a 2GHz CPU in the thing and it still couldn't multitask. I'd like my reviewers to understand that the OS has something to do with that.

"...BE-300 performed below average. It has the difficult-to-navigate Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 operating system". It apparently doesn't dawn on him that the Pocket PCs also run the CE 3.0 OS, but they are not difficult to navigate. Could it be that it's something other than that?

I admit I do like what he did with battery tests and it seems that no one ever just does a side-by-side comparison of Palm vs PPC devices on battery life. The thing is, can you trust that he did a reasonable job on that test given how little he knows about all the rest of it?

Ed Hansberry
06-08-2002, 04:12 PM
I work at the Post Office

Ok everyone. No one say anything to tick off Timothy. ;-)

Ed Hansberry
06-08-2002, 04:20 PM
This guy's pretty scary. How could you spend time doing a thorough review like this and get so many things wrong?

"A Type II CompactFlash expansion pack is $50, a PC Card expansion slot is $200 and a PCMCIA expansion slot $150. " Already commented on, but do you trust the opinion of someone who thinks that PC Card and PCMCIA are different things?
In fairness, I do wonder if he is talking about the new PC Card + pack with the removable battery?
Regarding the HP, "The built-in Type I CompactFlash slot can expand the RAM to 64M". Throughout the article he keeps saying that the flash memory cards increase the RAM in the device. That's pretty basic.
It does increase storage RAM.
Regarding the Sony, "Although Sony chose the 66-MHz Motorola DragonBall Super VZ processor instead of the 33-MHz version in other Palm OS PDAs, it still fell short of handling multitasking with digital pictures. " Well, yeah, you could put a 2GHz CPU in the thing and it still couldn't multitask. I'd like my reviewers to understand that the OS has something to do with that.
Actually, most Clie's do multitask to a certain degree - they can play music while doing other things. I suspect though it had more to do with updating the screen than anything else. That unit is hi res.
"...BE-300 performed below average. It has the difficult-to-navigate Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 operating system". It apparently doesn't dawn on him that the Pocket PCs also run the CE 3.0 OS, but they are not difficult to navigate. Could it be that it's something other than that?
The Pocket PC totally obscures the WinCE 3.0 UI. There is the core OS, and then the UI. Both the BE300 and PPC's use the core WinCE 3.0 OS, but the PPC's don't use the WinCE 3.0 UI as the BE300 does.
I admit I do like what he did with battery tests and it seems that no one ever just does a side-by-side comparison of Palm vs PPC devices on battery life. The thing is, can you trust that he did a reasonable job on that test given how little he knows about all the rest of it?
I didn't see any more errors on this report than I do on others in print. In fact, some web sites do a much worse job. This guy clearly got that a Pocket PC can be so much more than a PDA, which puts him in the rarified company of people that get it.

Rob Alexander
06-09-2002, 01:48 PM
This guy's pretty scary. How could you spend time doing a thorough review like this and get so many things wrong?

"A Type II CompactFlash expansion pack is $50, a PC Card expansion slot is $200 and a PCMCIA expansion slot $150. " Already commented on, but do you trust the opinion of someone who thinks that PC Card and PCMCIA are different things?
In fairness, I do wonder if he is talking about the new PC Card + pack with the removable battery?

Well of course he's quoting a price on that product, but he clearly doesn't understand what the products are that he's quoting. This is someone who's advice you want to take?


Regarding the HP, "The built-in Type I CompactFlash slot can expand the RAM to 64M". Throughout the article he keeps saying that the flash memory cards increase the RAM in the device. That's pretty basic.
It does increase storage RAM.

Nonsense. Flash memory is not RAM; it is static storage. You can no more say you are adding RAM to a PPC with a CF card than you can say you're adding RAM to your PC with a new hard drive. You may think you're "running" programs from your CF card, but your PPC is copying that program into RAM before running it, just as your PC does from the hard disk. You might call the storage area of the RAM in your PPC "storage RAM", but that's simply not a term that can apply to a CF card.

Regarding the Sony, "Although Sony chose the 66-MHz Motorola DragonBall Super VZ processor instead of the 33-MHz version in other Palm OS PDAs, it still fell short of handling multitasking with digital pictures. " Well, yeah, you could put a 2GHz CPU in the thing and it still couldn't multitask. I'd like my reviewers to understand that the OS has something to do with that.
Actually, most Clie's do multitask to a certain degree - they can play music while doing other things. I suspect though it had more to do with updating the screen than anything else. That unit is hi res.

Well I'm sure not an expert on the Sony products, but if they're running the Palm OS then they're certainly not multitasking. If the Sony can play music while doing other things, then Sony has added another chip of some sort to play the music while the Dragonball CPU does the other stuff. Adding multitasking ability to a single tasking OS is no trivial matter, and it's not likely Sony has expended that sort of effort.

"...BE-300 performed below average. It has the difficult-to-navigate Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 operating system". It apparently doesn't dawn on him that the Pocket PCs also run the CE 3.0 OS, but they are not difficult to navigate. Could it be that it's something other than that?
The Pocket PC totally obscures the WinCE 3.0 UI. There is the core OS, and then the UI. Both the BE300 and PPC's use the core WinCE 3.0 OS, but the PPC's don't use the WinCE 3.0 UI as the BE300 does.

Where do you get this stuff? The BE300 has a custom interface designed by Casio. Both the BE300 and PPC run the WinCE 3.0 OS, each with their own interface. You can't really believe that somewhere underneath the PPC UI is that BE300 interface.

I admit I do like what he did with battery tests and it seems that no one ever just does a side-by-side comparison of Palm vs PPC devices on battery life. The thing is, can you trust that he did a reasonable job on that test given how little he knows about all the rest of it?
I didn't see any more errors on this report than I do on others in print. In fact, some web sites do a much worse job. This guy clearly got that a Pocket PC can be so much more than a PDA, which puts him in the rarified company of people that get it.

So I guess that's really it, eh? He praises the PPC and so it really doesn't matter how much he gets wrong in the process? Sorry, but I have higher standards than that. I think people reviewing products should know more about those products than the average person hanging out in a forum like this one. (I'm certain that the vast majority of PPCT readers would not make those simple mistakes.) If he doesn't have the technological background to handle a review like this, then he simply shouldn't do it. Are you really that desperate for PPC recognition that you'll fawn over someone who says nice things about them, even if they obviously don't know what they're talking about? In my book you have to have a basic understanding of a topic before you can be said to "get it".