The Old vs. the New PDA

I have been playing around with HP’s iPAQ hx2795 PDA for a while now. There are a number of things that I really like about this little piece of hardware. I really like the fact that it has both Bluetooth and WLAN integrated and a hefty (by PDA standards) 624 MHz processor, which in itself is kind of amazing considering that in 1994, I was really exited when my college upgraded from 16MHz to 33MHz and at that time I was thinking, Wow! 33MHz? Awesome!!! This unit also has a total of about 256 MB of total memory. The nice thing about the memory is that it also has two built in slots, one for the Compact Flash card and the other for the Secure Digital card. Therefore in theory, your total memory is actually limited only by the size of the combined CF/SD cards and the built in memory.

Now there are a number of other PDAs that also have similar if not better features than this, but in comparison to the first PDA I owned in 2000, this is a quantum leap. My previous PDA, the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC h3650 did not have the built in wireless. So to logon to a wireless network, you had to buy an expansion pack that had the PCMCIA slot. If you had one slot, then you could either attach a wireless network adaptor such as the Orinoco gold card, or you could buy a CF card and the adaptor to slot in the CF card to slide into the PCMCIA slot. Now if you wanted both wireless and extra memory, then you had to use the double slotted expansion pack.

Once you had everything set-up, it all worked pretty well although the whole set-p was rather bulky,

The old iPaq + expansion pack + wireless adaptor = one huge brick!

Hence you can now see why I really like the fact that the PDA has really come a long way since back in the day.

So why did I get rid of my old iPaq 3650? The old one died. What happened was I lost the AC adaptor for recharging the battery. Unfortunately the battery was built-in and so when the whole thing died, I didn’t use it for almost a year. Finally I ordered a new AC adaptor and tried recharging the unit, but every time I was done and disconnected the unit, the charge was lost. I figured the battery was done, so I called up HP to find out about replacing the battery. The cost? $140 plus tax plus shipping. At that price, I knew it made more sense to simply buy a new one rather that mess around with the old.