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77 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect for the price, March 17, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Toshiba e335 Pocket PC (Office Product)
I couldn't help but notice all the complaints about battery life in the reviews here. 24-30 hours while the unit was turned OFF? I don't think so. I've had this unit off the charger for days, and kept a decent charge. Granted, if you leave it on, it drains the battery in several hours, but any backlit PDA does that. Good screen, good features, VERY thin and light, and better input methods and syncing than any Palm. Having the choice of transcriber, block input (i.e., Graffiti), character recognition, and keyboard for different situations is great. Pocket Word and Excel are included, as is Reader (load in a few books - it's great for boring staff meetings or waiting in line at the store). Programs like Notes, Tasks, and Calendar all have better functionality than their Palm counterparts. And these days, you just can't beat the price. Well, that's not true. Yes you can, with Dell's new PDAs. But those things look like bricks, compared to the Toshiba. For me, Toshiba's slim design was very important. Issues include a low expandability (only 1 SD slot) and a relatively slow 300 MHz proc - slow as in it's not 400 Mhz, mind you; it's still plenty fast for everyday use. Plus, it's less stable than the Palm OS. As a comparison, I had to restart my old Palm maybe once or twice in the year that I used it. This Pocket PC, I have to restart about once a week. It's somewhat annoying, but I find it an acceptable trade-off for the better features.
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very pleased with my Toshiba!, December 20, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Toshiba e335 Pocket PC (Office Product)
This is my 3rd PDA in one week, and I'm very happy with my decision to return my 2 previous purchases, both Palm's. I started with the Palm M500 thinking since this is my first PDA and I'm not a real "technoid", it should suffice. Wrong! I wasn't happy with the monochrome and I figured for a little more money I could double my memory and get color so I returned it for the 515m. While I was very happy with that product and had easily mastered the graffiti and the "user friendly" applications, I was not totally satisfied until I checked out the Pocket PC's. After much research and looking around, I chose the Toshiba e335, and I'm very satisfied with my purchase. It has the ability to play mp3's which the palms did not and the color screen is much easier to read than the palm m515. I also prefer the Microsoft format and the ability to chose which writing style I prefer; block recognition, transcriber, letter recognizer or keyboard. It also has a voice recorder which I haven't used yet. All in all this is a great unit and the more I play around with it the more I like it. I haven't had any difficulty synchonizing it and I have activated the Avantgo feature and update daily the channels I have selected to view. With this device and the os, I will not feel the desire, nor the need, to upgrade in the near future. This should satisfy for a very long time.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For those who demand more..., January 10, 2003
This review is from: Toshiba e335 Pocket PC (Office Product)
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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