Hand Era330

I recently gave up on Windows CE, partly because I've gotten tired of waiting for it to be as snappy as PalmOS, partly because of the third-party application support, and partly because there is finally a Palm-compatible with some of the nifty hardware features of the Pocket PCs.

I went with a [[Hand Era] 330]. As fast as the Platinum and Edge, but it has a larger screen -- the silkscreen area is actually part of the touchscreen display. That means that for programs that know how, that part of the screen can be used to display more stuff; it also means the (virtual) silkscreen can show virtual ink under your pen as you Graffiti. Also includes both a CF and an SD/MMC slot, and a microphone for voice recordings. The CF slot can be used for memory cards (I've got an old 40Mb card from my camera in it now and do regular backups to it) or for modems or Ethernet cards, and the SD slot can be used for memory cards or new stuff made for the m50x's. It comes in a Palm III form factor, which is just slightly clunky but has tons of accessories.

Including the Stowaway / Palm Portable Keyboard, which I did get too.

So far I really like it all, with one quibble: it has to be soft reset to do a Hot Sync (kinda like some of the early Visors, actually). Hand Era's had a few other reports and is looking into it. I don't sync too much (particularly because i can backup to the CF card), and it's not too big of a pain, so it hasn't bothered me. -- Peter Kaminski, 20010712

How many applications seem capable of using the extra screen space?

The screen is bigger two ways, so there are two answers. One way is by having the virtual silkscreen, and there aren't too many programs that take advantage of it yet, but there are kind of enough: the standard built-in apps do, along with 3rd-party apps like AportisDoc, Mapopolis, BigClock, QuikBudget, WordSmith, TealDoc, and QuickOffice. QuickOffice comes bundled with the 330. Flipping the screen into landscape mode and looking at documents or spreadsheets on a QVGA screen in a Palm III form factor is really nice.

The other way is more pixels in the display; the application area is 240x240 instead of the standard 160x160. For apps that don't natively use the extra pixels, but do use standard system APIs for drawing things on-screen, Hand Era has modified the system calls to present the same amount of information, but with higher resolution -- in particular, fonts are a little smoother. Some really old apps and things that do weird things with the screen -- games, and some drawing programs -- don't work well with this, and have to be used in either a centered or top-left 160x160 pixel-for-pixel mode. If you depend on a lot of these apps, this might put you off the Hand Era330.

This is probably confusing. A good overview, with pictures, is available in the review at http://www.memoware.com/handera330/. (Note the nifty Graffiti-area virtual keyboard is not released yet, but should be out in public beta in a week or so.) --Peter Kaminski, 20010712