By WILSON ROTHMAN
Last year, Dell decided that Pocket PCs don't have to cost an arm and a leg. That, in fact, they can cost less than their Palm-based competitors. Dell's newest Pocket PC, the Axim X30, shows Dell's continued push for high technology at a cheaper price. In the end, though, it's an example of the compromises that occur when form butts up against function.
The X30 has a 312MHz Intel chip with 64MB of RAM and another 64MB of internal storage. That's better than one of the older desktop computers I own. Although thinner and lighter than its predecessors, it has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking built in. This morning I rolled out of bed, turned it on, activated Wi-Fi, hopped on my secure wireless network and was reading TIME.com, all before the tea kettle starting whistling.
Thinner and lighter means sacrifices, however, and the biggest one is battery life. Full-on wireless networking really taxes the system. In my tests, I got about half a day of work before I started getting incessant low-battery warnings. The weird part: the battery meter is not displayed on the task bar next to the clock and volume control, so I didn't even know my battery life was low until the warnings began. I tried to find an option in settings to turn it on, but apparently no such thing exists.
Another performance issue is the handling of large pictures. The preponderance of PDAs — this one included — that accept the SD and MMC memory card formats strongly suggests that you buy a camera that uses those formats. However, when I pulled the MMC card out of Kodak's 4-megapixel Easy Share LS743 camera and put it into the X30's card slot, it struggled with the images. It didn't
have a problem recognizing the card for what it was, but it was slow to load thumbnails and took too long to get around to displaying any that I chose with the stylus. (On the subject of memory cards, I couldn't figure out how to format them with the X30 — this may seem innocuous, but it can lead to problems when moving files from computer to Pocket PC.)
I also ran into some of the usual Microsoft head-scratchers: I haven't described my experience with wireless Bluetooth synching, partly because of problems with the Palm software on my PC and also because of issues with the Axim. The utter absence of the word "Bluetooth" in Microsoft's included ActiveSync software (even in the help menus) left me a bit dumbfounded. Still, if you are patient enough with technology and want a good-looking, fully loaded Pocket PC for less, you should take a look at the X30. |
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