HP® iPAQ 211 Enterprise Handheld PDA, 624 MHz, 4 inch TFT, 128 MB SDRAM, Black

• Alarm(s) - Battery Charging, Battery Fully Charged, WLAN/Bluetooth Active
• Backlight - LED Backlight
• Battery Backup - Lithium-Ion 2200 mAH
• Catalog Publishing Type - PDAs-Standard
• Display - 4 inch TFT

My previous PDA was a 4 + year old Palm TX, so this review will largely focus on comparisons between that device and the HP 211.

General Observations:

A bit bigger and somewhat heavier than the Palm.

Seems well constructed and is nice-looking. I notice many reviewers rave about the screen, but to me it didn't seem noticeably better than the Palm. I didn't care for the case that came with it. The Palm had a cover over the screen that could easily be flipped open or shut and left me with something still slim enough to carry in a shirt pocket. The 211 came with a very close fitting case from which it cannot be easily extracted. It is nicer looking, but I lost the stylus the first day, due to the way you have to hold the PDA and pull on it to extract it. I have since replaced this with a Boxwave cover with magnetic clasp. But too bulky and heavy now to carry in my shirt.

Faults:

transition from portrait to landscape mode is slower than the Palm. You have to hold a button down for a few seconds, whereas the Palm only needed a single tap on an icon.

Documents are much slower to open or close than in the Palm. Also the Palm would remember my location when I closed a doc. The 211 always opens it at the beginning; so for long documents, it is a pain to find where you left off. Also in the palm, I could put book marks to easily find important sections in a long document; can't do that with the 211.

In the Solitaire game, which I play a lot, the cards seem a bit smaller and less distinct than on the Palm.

On the Palm, I could encrypt a single note; handy for storing credit card numbers and so on. Can't do that on the 211, although you can lock the entire device. This is a nuisance, so I had to figure out an alternative method of securing that type of information.

On the Palm, if I want to do a picture slide show, the orientation changed automatically as needed for each picture. The 211 doesn't do that, so if you start in landscape mode and come to a portrait-type picture, it will be displayed quite small. Also, the device doesn't seem to recognize that it's being used during a slide show, so it turns off after whatever time limit you have set for auto-off. Then you have to turn it back on, navigate back to the pics, find your spot again, etc.

Good Stuff:

Love the chime for calendar reminders. Pleasant sound and gradually gets louder. I use this now for my alarm clock, as it is not jarring to wake up to like a typical alarm clock.

Voice recorder. The Palm didn't have one. However, you have to hold the mike pretty close to your mouth if you want a decent recording. This wouldn't work out well if you wanted to record a meeting.

Game "Bubble Breaker." A screen full of different colored bubbles. Find 2 or more touching and double tap to remove them. The remaining bubbles above drop down. Get larger groups of same color bubbles together before removing and increase your score.

Removable battery. But the Palm battery (not removable) gave very good service the entire time I had it.

Voice recorder. I mention this twice because of a really nifty feature: you can append a voice recording to a note. This can be very useful, for example: I see a recipe I like but don't want to type the whole thing into my PDA. I can type a very short note, like "chicken pie" and then record the recipe as an attachment to that note. So later, I just look up "chicken pie" and then listen to the recipe.

I will not comment on features like the wireless, memory cards and so on, as others have done so more ably than I.

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