Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is another pocket knife throwback where we're taking a look at some vintage windows mobile devices devices that came out eight nine ten years ago recently we talked about the iPAQ 3600 series which really started the wave of PDA devices that have had similar to functionality that you would find on a PC so you could finally have capabilities in your pocket that you would normally need to get only through a computer it's really the start of the PDA revolution and this is a very large device but also a very popular device if we look at it next to an HD 2 we see just how how large it was in terms of thickness and in weight it was an absolute monster but you know people really didn't care because you got a 200 megahertz processor in a pocketable device so we're going to talk about the differences between this device the 3600 and this device over here the 3800 which is the successor to the 3600 but first let's take a look at this doc I know a lot of people that have this device also had this charging dock so this dock has a few features first you have stylus holders over here which is pretty cool I'm going to pop out the stylus and let's say you put this on your desk to sync and you can pop in your stylus and have it within easy reach although I never understood why there were two of them there who uses two style I am not sure let's look around the device we have a little slot for the wires to go through so it could sit nicely on a desk and these were the days when you didn't have wireless syncing so you definitely needed something like this let's see what is on the end of this cable we have two choices for connection we have serial I think this is Sarah serial and also USB so you could you could choose between the two okay so let's talk about how the 3800 and the 3600 differ and the 3600 came out in 2000 that's a full ten years ago and then the 3800 came out two years later now the 3600 came with Pocket PC 2000 that was the name of the operating system and this device came with Pocket PC 2002 although I haven't really used a so it may have an updated version like 2003 both devices have a two hundred and six megahertz strong ARM processor and of course we're up to about a thousand megahertz now with the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor the thirty-six hundred and thirty two megabytes of RAM and sixteen megabytes of ROM for storage the 3800 doubles that 64 megabytes of RAM and 32 megabytes of ROM both of them have the same size screen with QVGA resolution so that's just you know 320 across and 240 down it's a really grainy picture that you would get from them neither of these devices support Wi-Fi so you're not going to be able to get wireless internet although you could buy an adapter that would allow you to connect to the Internet I remember having an adapter for one of these devices I forget which one and it was a sleeve that actually had a networking port on it that you could plug a cat5 into neither of these devices at Bluetooth but they do have infrared so you can transfer through very very slow infrared the 3,800 added and expansion card slot here for SD whereas the the 3600 did not have that so you would actually have to get an expansion sleeve to be able to get that extra storage GPS forget about it camera forget about it these devices definitely didn't have those modern things although the battery in the 3800 was significantly bigger than the 3,600 3,600 was at 960 milliamp hours and this one all the way up to 1400 milliamp hours so you really got a lot more battery life out of the 3800 so kind of let's go through the procedure here of setting this device up we have this screen protector here that I know a lot of devices shipped with and you can kind of see the the evolution of design here so it went from this sort of ugly looking d-pad with a speaker inside of it to a a nicer looking almost artistic d-pad with the speaker up here so quite a nice evolution so it says tap the screen to begin of course this is an old resistive touch screen so you need to align it and we have to go through this whole process this was this was changed in later versions of Windows Mobile so you didn't have to go through this whole process and tap the screen to begin and now it's going to do some iPAQ stuff and this was before HP bought compact so this was actually the compact I pack and now they have the HP Ipek which they really haven't done much with they have the Ipek to listen which is a windows mobile 6.5 device but it's not getting that much attention because it doesn't do anything truly amazing so here we are and let's go through the settings and see what we're dealing with here this is again the old vintage interface of Windows Mobile so let's go to about see what we have here so this is version 3.0 which I think means is 2002 let's see what kind of programs we have on here the screen was very sensitive just like the 3600 because it had a recessed touch screen so the resistive layers were very close to one another compared to say the HTC touch Pro or touch diamond which really didn't have very sensitive screens because the the flush touch screen that they built it with so pretty good screen clarity nothing like you would get today that the backlight is quite dim very basic stuff the operation is actually quite fast there's nothing on here obviously right now here's the X button in the upper right corner let's see how long it takes to open up a new document oh it just spit you right into the new document you can access volume up here of course there weren't two sliders because this doesn't have phone functionality let's dig a little bit more into the settings to see an expansion pack settings so you can have an external battery for extra juice you can have all kinds of expansion packs I remember there's actually a camera expansion pack that we reviewed on pocket now a long time ago and see compact audio you can adjust the settings bass boost if you're listening to mp3s and people really started to get mobile with music with this device they loaded it up with mp3s Windows Media Player would play the music very ugly interface here let's see what we're doing with memory so right now we have free 27 megabytes of program memory not that much to work with of course we have a total of 32 megabytes and over here with storage we only have 32 megabytes also for storing documents and photos self-test it's kind of a developer tool here screen of course we can align the screen let's turn up brightness all the way and sort of see what what it looks like when we do that and here backlight brightness well this is actually maximum brightness this backlight is obviously dimmed over time because it it's quite a it's not very pride so anyway guys that was a quick look at the vintage iPAQ 3800 I'm sure a lot of you remember this device it was a big seller and it really started the wave of PDA devices that came down the line this was well before the smartphone operating systems when you could truly have some power in your pocket and be able to bring your calendar with you and your your contacts end with a big bulky expansion sleeve you could get internet it would be very very slow slower than 56k but it could happen this actually I believe has Internet Explorer on it probably the same version of Internet Explorer that was shipping a year ago because they haven't changed it very much so that was again a look at the iPAQ 3800 that's it for now