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102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A dissapointing saga, October 15, 1999
By A Customer
I had my company purchase a 2010c for me a little over a year ago. I was pretty excited since it was color. I was migrating from the first generation Compaq WinCE device (made by Casio) which I loved. I wanted more than anything to reduce my need to carry a laptop for most things. Because of my previous experience with Compaq and their good reputation, I expected an equally good experience. However, things began going wrong fairly rapidly. The first problem was with The battery life. Their life started out at nearly 4 hours continuous use, which I expected because it was a color machine. However, because of the way the cradle was designed, the NiMH batteries were being constantly charged. When NiMH batteries are treated this way they develop memory effect which seriously reduces their life. By the time I quit using the machine (after 9 months) the batteries would only support about 30 minutes of continuous use. The next problem happened after I upgraded the 2010c to the latest release of Windows CE, Handheld PC Pro. When you have appointments in your schedule, you usually set them up with a reminder. If the machine was off when an alert happened, it would wake up, turn the screen on and wait for you to acknowledge the alert. After a few minutes it was supposed to turn itself off. On the surface it appeared to, but I learned the hard way that it did not. Although the screen was black, taking it into a dark room revealed that it was actually glowing (on). The machine, sitting in my briefcase overnight, would stay on until it completely drained the batteries and the backup battery! This resulted in my complete loss of data three separate times. There was one instance where I could not use it when I was at a client site because of this phenomena. So I had to turn off reminders to keep this from occurring. So much for a useful PDA... Then the hinge on the case broke, and it will longer boot up except on rare occasions when Jupiter is aligned with Venus. The keyboard was bad, web surfing with the web browser extremely slow, syncing with the PC slow, and the office apps were severely limited in functionality. Little by little this experience trained me that I needed my laptop and that what I really needed was a better organizer. The unfortunate part was that others in my company liked the 2010c when I had first got it and subsequently bought them. At one time, there were five of us "WinCE" guys in the building. Today, none of them are in use. They all encountered the exact same problems. I tried a monochrome WinCE Palm-size PC next. It ended up mechanically failing. After 3 WinCE machines and being a WinCE zealot, I felt guilty buying a Palm V. What I ended up realizing was that there were several factors that were important to me: battery life, size, capabilities, wide universe of available apps, and good backlight. The Palm excelled in all of those. BTW, my wife's Casio monochrome WinCE device has been flawless and we both like it very much. IMHO, Casio makes a much higher quality device. For the price of the 2010c, I was highly disappointed.
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