Ok, I promise I won’t rant about the wonders of Mac OS X. This morning we took delivery of two HP iPAQ h5450s which we’re using to develop an application for the BBC.
First impressions are …. mixed. The hardware is gorgeous – matt silver, fantastic screen, bluetooth AND 802.11 wifi. They are fairly heavy but have a nice solid quality about them. They almost look like they should be mobile phones, with the little protruding rubber blob on the top-left.
But … the biggest downside has to be the WinCE – sorry, Pocket PC operating system. Maybe I’m just biased against all things Microsoft by now, but I find it clunky and unintuitive to use. The confirm/quit button in the top-right is in the wrong place. I haven’t found a way to synchronise it with either the linux laptop or the ibook. And so on …
There are saving graces. The “biometrics” fingerprint scanner is pretty cool, and makes a nice replacement to typing in passwords. And being able to browse the web full-speed when connected to our local wireless hub is fantastic – there’s something strangely beautiful about seeing the Cocoon 2.1 samples displayed on a pocket device!
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