Hubtime

PC Mag has a review of the HX4705 and they give it a thumbs up for hardware and a thumbs down for software. They did not bite their tongue

Of bigger concern to me was their estimate of the battery life. They estimated the life to be a lil over 4 hrs. ! Yikes! I would like to believe that the 1800mah battery that comes with the HX would be better than, if not equal to the battery life of an Ipaq 2215 with its 900mah battery.

I will be looking forward to confirming or countering this when I get my HX4705.

Here is the link to the PCMAG review:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1626988,00.asp

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Originally Posted by Hubtime

PC Mag has a review of the HX4705 and they give it a thumbs up for hardware and a thumbs down for software. They did not bite their tongue Of bigger concern to me was their estimate of the battery life. They estimated the life to be a lil over 4 hrs. ! Yikes! I would like to believe that the 1800mah battery that comes with the HX would be better than, if not equal to the battery life of an Ipaq 2215 with its 900mah battery. I will be looking forward to confirming or countering this when I get my HX4705. Here is the link to the PCMAG review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1626988,00.asp

The battery issue is probably related to the VGA screen it now needs to process more information... for a screen that is 4x larger. I would not be suprised to see all the battery life ratings come down significantly for all these units.

HX4705

The Software complaint...

From what I am seeing that guy was expecting a PC experience on the device when its not a PC.

Time will tell, but I am enjoying the HP4355 Im using right now as it is.

imported_ironguy

I wish they had detailed exactly how they were testing the 4700. They talk about 'typical-use'. What's that mean? Did they play video games? Play music with the screen on? What was the brightness setting?

In my experience, I've noted that most PPC users are pretty smart about the battery life on their PPCs. I know that my battery usage on my 2215 is far greater than I was led to expect. I imagine it will be that way for the 4700 users as well. It'll be interesting to see how battery life 'really' works.

Regarding the software, I have to agree to a certain point. IE sucks, Word and Excel certainly could be updated, and Explorer is dismal. MS has included a few 'upgrades' to their software such as PI5 and iTask (Gigatask). Very nice. Why don't they shell out a few bucks and include something like Resco Explorer, SpreadCE, TextMaker and the like. Multi IE comes to mind as well as other superior 3rd party applications. I can't imagine that Word development costs would be less expensive than subbing out the development. It would be very cool to have a piece of software for flashing the ROM with the programs you want. Start with the basic OS, then add your PIM of choice, word processor, Spreadsheet, Music Player, Vide Player, etc. Then flash your ROM.

Anyway, after saying all that, I guess that I would like to see more real world testing of these units. Put them in the hands of people who use them day in and day out - like me!

benn600

I agree with the software package being terrible. I do like that they are including Pocket Informant 5 (I was going to buy that a few weeks ago...glad I didn't). However, as far as the Pocket Word, Excel, etc., I really think that Microsoft is intentionally holding back because if they made all these programs the best, then the next version would require them to really try. If you make such a huge jump, then people won't have a reason to upgrade to Windows Mobile 2005 when it arrives.

sriram

i have to agree that some software on this marvelous hardware is pretty bad. IE is a particularly egregious example, especially the memory management. Since the screen on the 4705 is so good i tend to browse picture heavy sites. before browsing i had 13.23 mb in use. after surfing for about 5 minutes i shut down IE and made sure nothing nothing showed in the "running programs" list. when i looked at the memory it showed 14.41 mb in use. evidently IE did not clean up after itself.

the sad thing is that the wifi is really easy to use and it works very well, but IE, the supplied web browser is so terrible.

is there a better web browser?


thanks
sriram

ShALLaX

IE caches files - you need to clean out the "temp" directories. :\

sriram

Good point, thanks.
So here's what happened.
1) With nothing running (ie the running programs list empty), I had 14.70 Mb in use.
2) started up IE, selected options and deleted temp files.
3) shut down IE, removed it from the running programs list.
4) now the memory usage shows that 14.69 Mb is in use! Great, by removing the cache in the only way that IE offers, i get back 0.01 Mb. the rest of the 1.25 Mb (approx) that I lost by executing IE on a just-hard-resetted 4700 is still gone.

This is, I believe, an example of why IE's memory management is terrible. Maybe it's the OS itself rather than just IE? in any case, it looks like i need the nice memory cleanup software (memMaid) that i heard about. now where did I put my credit card...

Sriram

Originally Posted by ShALLaX

IE caches files - you need to clean out the "temp" directories. :\