By 

Mehmet C. Mocan (Boston, MA United States) –

  

This review is submitted for people who demand more than basic PIM functions out of their PDAs. If you are looking for a simple PDA with only a calendar, an address book and a memo pad, you should really go and get Zire or m105. They are really good.

However, I wanted to upgrade my PDA (m100) and was looking for a device with at least 16 MB memory, good resolution color screen and preferably mp3/wma playing capability. I initially considered Palm m500 series but had to give them up because of their bad reputation (which I personally experienced) for screen freezing that was not amenable to a soft reset. The worst part is that you have to send them to Palm to get them fixed that takes about 2 weeks in which time you are left Palmless. I could not accept my PDA freezing anytime because I really depend on it every instant. So as a demanding PDA user who wanted more memory and functions than my Palm m100 could offer, I had no choice to convert to a Pocket PC.

Pocket PCs inherently provide mp3 playback capability and word/excel document access in addition to basic PIM functions that are great.

E335 stood out among others with its 64 MB memory, 300 MHz processor, good color screen, lightness and sleekness. What I have also noticed is that it does not freeze and when it did a couple of times, it always responded to soft resets. The stereo quality is really very good and I enjoy listening to music (a dream with Palm OS for the moment).

ArcBase photo program is really cool and for those who demand photo viewing, it makes the Pocket Pc much more enjoyable.

The two drawbacks of e335 were that the Graffiti recognition was about 40% worse when compared to Palm (screen protectors help the recognition and I strongly recommend them for graffiti) and that when you transfer your memos from Palm, they are not automatically categorized. I had about 400 individual memo items and spent a great deal to organize them. By the way, unless you have Pocket mirror, there is no easy “free” way to transfer your info from Palm to Pocket PC.

One last thing, with Pocket PCs you cannot individually hide items as private (unlike Palm OS devices). You need to pay to get additional software for security. The device offers an optional initial security code for access to device, though.

The battery performance is predictably poor (needs once in very 2 days charging with optimum usage; mp3, bright screen etc) when compared to 2 months performance by a gray scale m100 on 2 AAAs but I come home everyday so that is not an issue for me. If you are going to get any high-res color screen PDA, you will inevitably sacrifice the battery no matter what.

I have to admit I still favor Palm OS over Windows CE because of its simplicity but the recent Palm models were not reliable enough for me to commit to. Now I can work on my Word documents with any of the 4 brightness-adjustable high-res color screen options and listen to a crisp sounding stereo mp3 tracks or just view my photo album in my spare time.

The manual does not involve the type of troubleshooting that is necessary. It is very important that you do not remove the synchronized files (Word, mp3, etc) from the PocketPC My Documents desktop folder without first deleting them from the Pocket PC. If you do remove them, the sync. Manager will give resolving conflict messages which are not solvable. This is the only important message that I can convey.

Overall, I believe that e335 is one of the best Pocket PCs around and it has completely satisfied my expectations except for the Graffiti recognition. I got the device at Amazon.com at an incredible price, which was much cheaper than M515! Incredible…

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