March 07, 2005 - My New Axim

Migrated from Archive

Recently I retired my iPAQ 3765 in favor of what I hoped to be a Toshiba e805 PDA. Very nice indeed as I have seen a colleague with his. This PDA was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, due to some rather unconstructive complaining by customers and a rant for another time, Toshiba is no longer making the PDA available. As such I went for the second best thing. An Axim x50v from Dell, which while very nice on the surface has a single if somewhat less then fatal flaw.

The Axim is a very nice and robust true VGA capable device. It has an SD and a CF expansion port, in addition to blue tooth and wifi on board. While dell has thrown in some pretty useless programs it is a fairly standard Xscale 625 MHz processor, so finding applications for it is not difficult. Along with the standard battery, Dell offers an extended battery with a 'hunchback' battery cover replacement. While it is nice to be able to swap batteries pretty easily, having to carry two battery covers in addition to my batteries does present somewhat of a challenge.
As with all dells, USB sync-charging can be iffy. The main problem is that the Axim requires the full output capability of a standard USB port to charge it's batteries; and very few motherboard manufacturers actually output as much as the specs request. The result is a USB sync cable from Dell which requires an additional power adapter. There are some Ziplinq-esque cables on the market, but they often aren't the highest quality, and your mileage may vary.
The single biggest and truly unworkable problem is the ram. In its infinite wisdom, Dell chose to misrepresent the layout of the 152 mb ram available on board, in it's specs. The actual layout is 92 MB for "Built-in Storage" (Non-volatile) and 62 for Main memory. Initially this seems like a really god idea. I can install my programs to Built-in storage and not worry about the having to do a hard reset. Unfortunately the, when running many of the pim enhancement programs out there, like Snoopsoft's Dashboard, the RAM available to the system is roughly 30 megs. It seems that with that much space, the Axim can just load the Wireless and Bluetooth Stack. If you have anything else running in memory, forget it. There is a 200 dollar memory upgrade to change main memory to 128 megs from ppctechs.com. I am told it works, but until my warranty runs out, I am not willing to do anything about it.