I purchased a Hewlett-Packard iPaq rx 1955 a couple months ago. Now that I’ve had sufficient time to set it up and get a feel for the way it works, I’ve reached a preliminary verdict: I absolutely love it so far!!
This is the first PDA I’ve ever owned, and as I stated before, I mainly bought the device in order to be able to read e-books, keep track of tasks, and maybe watch a few videos. I had no idea that PDAs couldn’t do those things right out of the box. I mean, the package states that the iPaq comes with Windows Media Player and the Mobile edition of Word, which I thought would be sufficient for my purposes. But the media player won’t play .avi or .mpeg files, and I couldn’t even get my book (in .doc format) to open on my PDA.
After a bit of online research, I found a couple of great freeware apps that neatly did the trick. First, I found a site called PDA Gold that has a bunch of freeware for Pocket PCs. Although the site itself looks a little iffy (looks like a spam site at first glance), I found this e-book reader on it. I installed it and it works like a charm so far. Now I can import e-books in .txt format and have them nicely formatted in the reader.
I also found this media player called TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player). It was easy to download and install, and now I have no trouble viewing the .avi files that I regularly download.
Overall, I have to say that my iPaq seems like a fantastic little device! I wanted to go with an entry-level unit just to see if I liked it, and so far I definitely do. I probably will never even need a more powerful device; this one does everything I want it to. I know it’s only been one day, but unless something drastic happens to it, I don’t expect to change my mind about my iPaq anytime soon. If you’re thinking about buying a PDA, you can’t go wrong with the iPaq rx 1955!