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193 of 199 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why Helio?, November 11, 2000
Negative criticism at the bottom.I was looking for an inexpensive pda, but a pda that's worth more than it costs. I found the Helio. Palm and Handspring units are way overpriced when compared to the Helio. I am a student. I use the scheduler to keep track of appointments or important days or activities (the alarm has a tone or a voice recording option). I use a folder under memos to list my courses, in which I keep track of assignments, tests, etc. The to-do list is great for keeping track of things you need to do (it also has an alarm that you can set, but don't have to). If I only have a few seconds to write down an assignment or something I need to remember, then I can record it instead of writing it down (4 button pushes: on, record, stop, off). It keeps track of expenses, has a phonebook, you can sketch where you put your car or have a friend draw you a map of how to get somewhere, and jot is 1000 times better than any other writing recognition system I've seen. I can actually *write* into it as fast as I can write a note on paper (mistakes are minimal, and mostly result from my habit of rotating the angle of writing). I have a few clips of music that I recorded for myself. 50 minutes of recording time is nice. Quality is decent (not stereo quality, but that's not necessary from a pda). I got the eReader and a few ebooks. I read "Waiting for Godot" on my Helio. Another useful application I downloaded was a program that has a timer, a stopwatch, an alarm that you can set without putting something in the scheduler (better for a quick reminder for later, like "call sue at 4"), and an analog clock. Time and date are at the top of the screen. The scrolling buttons at the side are very useful (many palm and visor users have commented on how nice that is over their units). Shortcut buttons to applications are more useful than you can imagine (quick jump from scheduler to memo or search). It shows the time in any time zone with just two clicks. I put some of my writings on my Helio too. All you have to do is use the Helio Desktop and copy a document into a memo. Sync it, and you have a document in your Helio. It doesn't support font sizes, different fonts, bold, italic, and such (it's basically like Windows Notepad), but I think they're making a new application to do that. Not important to me anyway. I use my finger sometimes to write sometimes. What doesn't it have? What don't I like about it? Well, it doesn't have infrared. At this point, I don't see a need for it, so I don't particularly care. There isn't a huge variety of software. I definitely don't see a "need" for software. They are working on some useful applications, like a map program and an mp3 player. The scheduler isn't the greatest, but no other pda I've seen has one any better. BTW, most bad reviews are of the old Helio. They fixed those bugs and added a lot of things. Check the date on bad reviews. (new Helio was released around April 2000, I think) I've used about 40% of my battery power after a week. It *seems* like a lot, but that might be mostly due to the fact that I've been using it very often over the last week. I haven't had any bugs or errors on it or on the software. The battery gauge is a little quirky. It usually shows what it is, but now and then it'll show 100% battery power, which I know isn't true. The other thing is that I can't find anything to use the accessories slot for. They said something about a keyboard/modem combo for $100, but I can't seem to find it. I don't think it's available yet. The Visor has a camera and the Palm has a few things, like their modem and their keyboards, but those aren't really that useful. 75Mhz is nice, but is it really that useful? On Palms, you wait maybe 2 seconds between applications. On Helio, you wait .2 seconds. It's nice, but for 1.8 seconds, is it really a selling point? Then again, it is useful for the search function... Nicely fast searches when compared with Palm searches (and I searched 700k of documents for a single word, so it's not like I was searching nothing). Ok, so Helio offers Linux. I like VT-OS. I'm sure almost all people who have the Helio like VT-OS. Do we care about Linux? No. Selling point? No. Some people might, but it's not a selling point for the majority. Oh yeah, and I'm looking for a nice case. They offer 5 cases that I've seen (comes with one, that I'm using now...it's fine, but I'm looking for something bigger to be a wallet and a pda case), but I don't like those as much. Many companies offer cases, but most of those don't fit the Helio. Vtech is continually updating their operating system (which isn't all for bugs...they added extra options to scheduler and let you configure jot and stuff like that...they also let applications use greyscale), they're working on more applications, and they're trying to give users options as far as applications for the Helio and syncing software.
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