Re: Dell Axim X51v vs. HP Ipaq HX2495

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It's a little late now, since you've ordered the Dell, but I'll toss my
two-cents worth in for future readers.

First, regarding the rx3115 mentioned earlier, it is a great PDA...with
one fault. After the digitizer started failing, I noticed many others
complaining of the same issue. Since a digitizer replacement is about
$185, that is a major consideration. If you buy one, make sure you get
an extended warranty because in this case you have an excellent chance
of using the warranty.

I looked at both the HP models mentioned and the Dell and was put off
by the bulkiness of the devices and meager battery life. After a lot
of agonizing and going back and forth, I ended up with the HP iPAQ
rx1955. It is in a totally different class for power, memory etc. But
I find it delightful.

I had purchased Anton Tomov's Pocket Hack Master program for the rx3115
that overclocks the processor. One of the fallouts from that purchase
and the experimentation I did, was I found the processors on these PDAs
are idling most of the time. One of the features of the program is a
graphical history of processor demand. Even with Windows Media Player
running, the rx3115 had only about a 10% processor demand. So whether
the PDA has the capacity for 300 MHz, 400 MHz or 600 MHz won't mean the
processor is running at that speed all the time.

The memory is meager, but I use a freeware program called Magic Button
that closes programs completely when you click on the OK button in the
upper right of the window. So I'm not running into an issue of too
many programs running in too little space. Load times don't seem any
different than they did on the rx3115 and I feel they are responsive
enough to where they aren't an issue.

I did some testing in the store prior to the purchase using two
programs that I know can consume a lot of memory. Avantgo offers a
free Golf game, and it requires 8-10 MBs of RAM to boot up. Even
though the rx1955 has only about 10-11 MB of free RAM, it had no
problems. The other program I tested is a Bible program called
e-Sword. (It's free and far better than any other Bible program I've
seen.) Anyway, the normal usage is around 2 MB of RAM, but if you do a
full Bible search, it seems to load the entire Bible and consumes about
10 MB of RAM. Again, no problems, even when the available RAM was
about 8 MBs. I'm not sure how the memory management is handled, but
they seem to have done a good job with it.

The screen may not be VGA, but it is beautiful (as was the one on the
rx3115). One consideration in going VGA is that it requires more
battey power to crunch the extra data. I once compared the rx3115, a
Palm TX and one of the HP models (I don't remember the model number)
that had VGA side by side. While there was a difference, it was hard
to tell except by looking at the screens extremely closely.

The one thing I can't believe about the rx1955 is the phenomenal
battery life I'm experiencing. I have no idea how many days of heavy
use it will take before needing a charge, because in heavy use, I'm
only getting it down to around 93% after hours of use. Even running
the wireless or playing movie segments doesn't drop the battery hardly
at all.

And if you're looking for a small lightweight PDA, the rx1955 fits the
bill.

.

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