Toshiba e740 - VERY disappointed!! Any comments...??

[Michael G.]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post here. Cool site!

Here goes...

I just sold my Jornada 565 206MHz unit and got the Toshiba.

So far, I am very disappointed. Here's why:

(1) The LED is on the side, towards the bottom. It was so awkward beaming my info. Terrible.

(2) There is no flip-case for it. The HP had a protective cover. The Compaq had that rubber thing. This is WAITING to be scratched.

(3) Battery performance: Terrible! I used it VERY moderately this afternoon while at a client's. No Wi-Fi. Nothing too exciting. I come home and turn on the WI-FI.. next thing you know.. MAIN BATTERY CRITICALLY LOW. Unbelievable. Yet when I put in the cradle, it said it was at 72%. Very strange.

(4) VERY VERY sluggish video. Windows Media Player is able to handle wmv files with no problems on my Jornada. On this thing, it was terribly jumpy. Horrendous. Even the sample Madonna video skipped a lot. I tried it both from the CF card, and from Internal memory. No change.

(5) The speaker: The worst I've seen in a PDA. The IPAQ is great. The Jornada mediocre, but on this thing, even the ActiveSync connection chime sounds bad. Very tinny.

(6) I turned the unit off while being charged. All of a sudden, it turns on activesync, and I got two bizarre error messages. I've hand 4 PDA's prior to this and have never seen such a thing. I wonder if it will disconnect periodically, too, like others have noted here.

(7) Sluggish performance. One would think that a brand new 400MHz CPU would blow away my Jornada 204MHz CPU. Not so! When a few apps are running, this thing is just as slow. No noticeable improvement in any app, including opening an e-book.

(8) The On-Off switch is a bit bizarre. With the Jornada, one press was on, one press was off. During use, you hold it down to turn off the light. This one is acting strange. Sometimes it turns on with the light, sometimes without. And the on-off button isn't very responsive.


Well, there you have it. Some of my complaints are ergonomic issues, based solely based on my opinion. Others, though, such as the terrible movie playback and terrible speaker... In my opinion; unacceptable for a machine with double the processing power.

It's too bad I sold my Jornada. Now I am somewhat stuck. At least I have 14 days to return this thing if there is no improvement.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Anyone care to try one of my videos, to see how it performs on your machine? Anyone think I'm being too picky?

Thanks,

MG

[spursdude]

as for the x-scale processor problem, the problem is the processor itself, not the toshiba. a lot (if not all?) of the x-scale devices reviewed (i.e. ipaq 3900 series and e740) have turned out poor performance, due to lack of software optimization.

as for turning on activesync - is there any scheduling set? (tools>options>schedule) i noticed that problem, but then turning off scheduling fixed it.

[Michael G.]

Hi there,

I am glad to hear (well kind of, anyway), that other x-scale devices are also plagued by lousy performance. Maybe a service release for CE is being planned.

Good point witht the ActiveSync schedule, but that wasn't the problem...

Oh well.

I'll continue shopping!

MG

[Nikhil]

The e740 also has the poorest performance of the XScale bunch right now...If you could compare both a 39xx and a e740, the e740 would definately appear more sluggish (hour glasses popping up frequently vs. not so on the 39xx). Having owned the e550g, e740, and 3970, the e740 is the worst performing and the e550g and 3970 are equal in performance...I'd say on par with my 3835 and Jornada 568. I can keep many programs open on my 3970 and it will still perform well.

[David27]

I have had the pleasure of using 3 different 740e’s for an extensive amount of time due to a certain piece of software destroying the stylus alignment to a point beyond repair on the first two units. All three units came from the same store. I know for a fact that the 3rd unit, my current unit, came from a different shipment. I restored my units from a full backup off a Sandisk SD card each time, so I had for the most part the same software and settings on each unit minus the deadly stylus alignment destroying software on the third unit. Here is the interesting observation; I would be willing to bet a couple thousand dollars that my third unit performs almost two times faster than my first two units ever did and that is before I ever even ran the stylus alignment destroying program on the original two units. I never ran any scientific tests but for example when running Pocket Divx on the first two units it would always drop frames on the three videos I downloaded, aliensong, cookieblues, and officexp_320x240. As far as I can tell by eye there are never any noticeable frame drops on my third unit. I always ran the three videos off of the same Sandisk SD card on all three units.

I know you could argue that the first two units had an out-of-the-box hardware problem that I just did not see until I ran a certain piece of software, but I am of the strong opinion that there was no specific hardware problem with the first two units. The problem I ran into was caused by soft resetting the unit while a specific piece of software was running, Cubicle Chaos. This leads me to ask why my third unit performs almost 100% better. From memory, all three units had the same OS Version (Ver. 3.0.11171 (Build 11178). I am not sure if model number means anything, but my third unit has a model number of PA3170U-3P05.

I have the feeling there is something very different about that hardware/ROM of my third unit when compared to my first two units, but I am at a loss to figure out how to prove it. One other interesting note each time I restored a new unit from a full back file of an older unit the restored Storage usage was over 1MB less. My first unit was running at 12MB of Storage usage when I last backed it up. My current unit with a couple additional software packages installed, minus Cubicle Chaos, more appointments, additional AvantGo channels, more web cache and more contacts, etc. is currently running at 9MB.

To state it briefly, my third unit is beyond noticeably faster and seems to be more efficient at storing files/data in Storage and I do not know how to tell why.

Thanks…
Dave