Your humble computer columnist is about to gush over something from Microsoft again. If you could watch my e-mail pop up on days I do this, you’d see that it can be (ahem) kind of courageous to say something upbeat about the oft-reviled Raptor of Redmond, Wash.
You’d be amazed at how many of the e-mails start with or end with furious attacks against the Microsoft software applications that don’t work on Microsoft operating systems sold by Microsoft partners like Dell, Gateway and the 800-pound gorilla on the retail computer gear scene, Hewlett-Packard Co.
Today’s gush is prompted by a rather unfamiliar and utterly welcome experience when I set out to review a complex HP product, the iPaq h4155 Pocket PC, which is the latest and maybe the lightest (weight wise) personal digital assistant now on the market.
The model under review costs a whopping $449.99 at www.hp.com, a mighty steep step above the likable and sturdy $100 Palm Zire 21 based on the competing Palm operating system (www.palmone.com). The Palm Zire 21 does a fine job of providing business functionality to match PDAs based on Microsoft’s new Mobile PC operating system.
A bunch of the folks who write those anti-Microsoft e-mails will note that a mope like me all but makes Microsoft a religion when focused exclusively on a Microsoft Windows XP computer running Microsoft Office 2003 and linked to a Microsoft Mobile PDA.
A lot of these people favor the equally powerful Macintosh OS X 10.3 (Panther) running Microsoft Office for Mac on a G4 or G5 Apple computer equipped with a Palm PDA like the Zire.
To them I say, Right On!
The reason they become strict advocates of Microsoft alternatives is that the more closely one gets attached to a complete computer product line the better their software, peripherals and gadgets will work and the happier the technology side of life will be.
That’s why I am charged up over the fact that I had an unusually smooth experience while installing the iPaq h4155 on my Pentium 4 running Microsoft Office 2003. I then loaded the Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7 software that drives the iPaq and lets it synchronize with Microsoft Office and transfer business and recreation files back and forth.
Over the roughly 11 years I have been writing these columns I’ve documented plenty of unhappy experiences while attempting to install Microsoft-based PDAs.
What a difference a decade can make.
The iPaq h4155 is much more elegant than a Zire or most other PDAs.
At a tad under 5 ounces and 3/8-inch thick, you could add a cell phone to the circuits and still have a pocket-size powerhouse. Power comes through a rechargeable 1000 mAh lithium battery good for at least a full day’s use.
The iPaq connects to a desktop or laptop computer by means of a docking cradle and shares pint-size editions of Microsoft’s Outlook, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Media Player 9.0 programs.
The 4155 model includes a built-in Bluetooth transmitter that can send documents to a printer using Bluetooth receivers. As with other PDAs in the Palm and Microsoft worlds, it also beams documents to other devices using a short-range infrared transmitter/receiver.
Bluetooth also can connect the PDA to global positioning system receivers and use included software to display maps with one’s exact location.
The 400 megahertz chip in the 4155 model is fast enough to even play tiny movies on the 3.5-inch TFT 64,000-color screen. It also plays MP3 music after automatically converting it into a flavor of Microsoft’s proprietary WMA music file format.
While the onboard memory available is under 40 megabytes, the device boasts a SD/MMC type memory card slot that lets one feed in 256 mb storage cards like coins into a jukebox.
This means that the iPaq 4155 is almost competitive even with Apple’s marvelous iPod as a digital music player even though the iPods come with 10 gigabytes of memory. You simply load up on SD cards and keep them in a pocket for commute time listening.
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If you do that, you have a PDA built into your portable music machine and it’s one that can handle Outlook messages complete with attachments.
Because it is so tiny and the screen is unprotected, I’d consider plopping down another $159.99 for a three-year, next-day replacement warranty. Of course, you could buy 1.5 new Zires for the same tariff.
To me, the icing on the cake is that the 4155 also comes with built-in wireless 802.11b network access that lets a user go on line anywhere within reach of a wireless transmitter like the ones in my house. It did just as well at Starbucks, where, I am told, using a supermodern gadget to access wireless Internet is considered a babe magnet.
That magnetic business, however, did not seem to work in my own otherwise successful iPaq tests. Could it be something about me? Nah!
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611