ajabbari

Ok, today I had a bunch of spare time on hand and decided to go ahead and take the plunge (from A00 -> A05). I'm happy to say that the upgrade process itself went very smoothly, and I had no problems there.

As to the OS itself, here are my impressions. I went into this thinking WM2003 was going to cause me more problems than it would solve. So far it would appear that this isn't true. I read a lot of reports indicating that WM2003 felt dramatically faster, my impression was that on the surface it didn't feel much different than PPC 2002. That being said, I did notice that the performance seems more consistent (there are less odd pauses, documents open a bit faster). I should mention that I have an original PXA250 Axim.

I remember reading a lot about sound problems, so far I can't say that I'm noticing any problems. Yes the startup sound is gone (though its absence seems deliberate) but I haven't noticed any audio problems (stuttering or popping) so far.

There was also mention of networking issues. I use a Dell Truemobile 1180 and had read many reports of people having problems with this card. Happily, I can report that so far aside from the card permanently being stuck in power managment mode I am having no other troubles. As soon as I popped the card in WM 2003's networking popped a box up asking me which network I'd want to connect to and it did so.

One other minor but notable improvement I noticed relates to Cleartype. I noticed that in Microsoft Reader I'm no longer getting the orange/brown fringing around text that I used to see. Furthermore, so far I haven't had any problems with ActiveSync or AvantGo either as some reported. Actually, activesync seems a lot faster now.

Of course, I'll be sure to mention any problems I may run into after I use the OS for a few days. At this point though everything seems pretty good.


UPDATE: I spent a few hours with my Axim last night and haven't run into any problems. In fact I've noticed a few more improvements. For some reason it would seem that my screen does a better job of interpreting stylus input, especially around the edges. With A00 if I were to try to draw straight lines along the edges of the screen they would come out jittery, the sensitivity seemed sort of hit and miss, now with A05 I'm noticing that the input is much cleaner and more accurate. This may just be due to an update of the touchscreen driver, but whatever it is I like it.

Contrary to what I was saying before the Axim is definitely faster. I started noticing the improvements as I switched between apps and played games like Bejeweled (smoother framerate). Pocket IE is also much faster. It still isn't quite like the desktop version but it's close. I think one of the biggest improvements is that graphics are now drawn very quickly. Before, even on a cached page each graphic, no matter how small, would take a second to draw; this is no longer the case.

Admittedly, I'm not using a wide range of third party apps with my Axim, but I can say that I haven't had a single problem with WM2003 so far. Some of the accounts on this board painted a grim picture of the OS, making me skeptical of it's stability/performance on the X5. I'm not sure how to explain the problems some people are having with their X5's, perhaps for some reason the OS doesn't flash quite right into the ROM in some cases. Otherwise, it would seem that if you weren't having problems before, you shouldn't have any now. The only exception to this would probably be for people who use lots of 3rd party software.