ViewSonic V356 April 2003 The HP H1910 isn't the only $299, ultra-thin Pocket PC out there. How does ViewSonic's first PDA measure up? After months of waiting, I finally got my ViewSonic V35 to review (about a week before ViewSonic announced the V37; hmm...). Granted, after working the PDA counter at CompUSA for the last five months, I was pretty familiar with the device before I got one to take home. It's a nice device, but I didn't really appreciate a lot of its finer points until I got to carry it around for a while. The biggest single advantage the V35 has over other Pocket PCs is how much less of it there really is. I've owned a lot of Pocket PCs, but this is the first one I've actually been able to carry in my pocket and forget that it was there. At a hair over three inches, it's wider than I prefer, but it's only four ounces in weight, and thin as a Palm V. The first time I picked one up, last October at Möbius, I thought it was a plastic mock up rather than a functional device. Now that I've had one for a while, that feeling hasn't completely gone away. This size and weight (shared by the Palm m515 and the iPAQ H1910) really is the "magic" form factor for PDAs. This is a no-compromise, take-anywhere kind of device. Once you get over the weight -- or lack thereof -- the next thing you're likely to notice is the screen. In a direct side by side comparison, the H1910's screen has a little better color saturation, though it's not quite as bright. Looking at the V35 on its own, though, shows a wonderful 16-bit transflective TFT with stunning brightness and clarity. I have to admit a dirty little secret. I didn't really think transflective screens were "all that" until I got this device. The reflective screens on the Pocket PC Phone Edition and the Palm Tungsten line are great, as bright and clear as I could hope for, but this is better. Indoors, this screen puts my laptop to shame. Outdoors, I must admit it's not as bright as the pure reflective screen on my XDA -- reflective screens are still the optimum choice for phones and PDA/phone combos -- but it's quite readable, light years ahead of my old transmissive-screened Jornada 548. Of course, the beautiful screen on the V35 holds a dark secret (as do so many beautiful things). As great as it looks, it is easily the worst screen I've ever seen at rendering ClearType. Letters are splotchy and borderline unreadable, with green ghost images that are sometimes wider than the strokes of the letters themselves. It's far worse than the ClearType implementation on the original iPAQ. Yet I don't think the screen is the problem. µBook 0.7a, which bypasses Microsoft's ClearType engine and does a fine job of sub-pixel font rendering on its own, looks stunning. RGB smoothed text in µBook is easily the blackest, clearest text I've ever seen on a PDA, better even than my XDA. The screen can handle this technology with aplomb, so we can only hope that the V35's ClearType issues can be corrected with a software patch from ViewSonic. (David, are you listening?) Assuming you're using µBook -- and why wouldn't you be? -- the V35 makes a great ebook reader. It's made even better by the inclusion of a jog dial on the side, just above the record button. This is a spring-loaded dial that only moves about 30 degrees of arc in either direction, unlike the free-spinning wheels on Sony devices. Personally, I prefer this type as it makes it easier to continuously scroll though something by just holding down the dial in the proper direction rather than constantly spinning it with my finger (and yes, I really am that lazy). The action/select button is accessed by pressing in on the jog dial, and there's a distinctly different motion to this than scrolling. It's actually difficult to select something accidentally while scrolling. The headphone jack is oddly placed, on the right side about three-quarters of the way down, and it's extremely awkward for me as a southpaw to hold the device in my right hand while headphones are plugged in. Given the diminutive size of the device, I suppose they had to put the headphone jack wherever it would fit. Placement aside, the sound quality out of the headphones is clear and loud. Listening to Audible books in Microsoft Reader is almost impossible at max volume without blowing eardrums out, and remember I listen to low-bitrate MP3s -- well, Ogg Vorbis now in WinAmPAQ -- because I have slight hearing damage in both ears and can't hear the difference between those and high quality. Get the point? This thing is loud. Sound through the speaker is about average for a "normal" Pocket PC, ie. something other than an XDA with a speaker designed to be used as a speakerphone. It's fine for alarms, but tinny for listening to audiobooks or music. Okay, enough about reading on/listening to the device. This column is about writing. How does the V35 work for the mobile writer? Well, as long as you're okay with not using ClearType in Pocket Word or TextMaker, it works great. It's smaller and lighter than most other PDAs, and as I mentioned in my recent column on keyboards, a foldable and relatively light keyboard is readily available for it. The Darfon keyboard for the V35 (sold under the ViewSonic brand) is about 85% the size of a desktop or laptop keyboard, so there is a very slight adjustment compared to, say, a full sized Stowaway, but I can type at close to full speed on it. The keyboard and V35 together are smaller and lighter than a Stowaway by itself, and the keyboard fully supports running the V35 off external power while typing. If you're stuck somewhere where breaking out a keyboard isn't practical, the V35 comes with one of the better styli available. It's thick -- unlike the H1910's toothpick -- and metal, and although it has to be a bit stubby to fit in the limited space available for the stylus silo -- it's vaguely reminiscent of those tiny pencils you get to mark your scorecard in mini-golf -- it telescopes out to full length. I'd still prefer writing with a full size pen/stylus combo, but I'm noticeably more accurate with the V35 stylus than my old XDA toothpick. The V35 sports a 300MHz Intel XScale PXA250 CPU, which is a hair faster than the venerable 206MHz StrongARM at things like spellchecking, though the multimedia speed is about 5% slower thanks to the 100MHz data bus (compared to 103MHz for the StrongARM). The CPU can be set to run at 300MHz, 200MHz or automatically switch speeds on the fly as needed. I have mine set to auto, which slightly improves battery life with no really noticeable dip in performance. (The forthcoming V37 has a newer 400MHz PXA255 XScale with a 200MHz data bus, so it should be significantly faster than the V35.) Speaking of battery life, I was concerned about this before I got the unit. The ViewSonic only has room for a 900mAH battery, on the light end, especially since I'm coming from a 1,250mAH Jornada and a 1,550mAH XDA. I'm pleased to announce that the battery life on the XDA is sufficient, if not stellar. I don't know if it's the XScale CPU -- I doubt that, frankly -- the transflective screen that wastes far less light than reflectives, or what it is, but the V35 stretches that 900mAH for all it's worth. I can type for about two hours and only drop the battery to 80%. I'm getting about four and half to five hours of use on a single charge, and plugging it into the charger for half an hour will fully charge it back up to 100% from the battery warning at 40%. In short, the V35 can stand up to a day of heavy use as well as any other PDA, in spite of what would seem to be an undersized battery. That said, I've ordered a three-way charging solution (an USB sync-and-charge cable that can also plug into modules to convert it into a car charger or AC adaptor) from Moonlight Technologies for the V35 and will plan on keeping it topped off as often as possible. I also run it off external power when typing as often as I can. If you want to pick up a car charger or an extra wall charger, you'll find the second dark truth of the ViewSonic V35. This device is the red-headed stepchild of accessories. Initial sales of the V35 didn't burn up the world like the H1910, and there are precious few aftermarket accessories available. The device takes a pretty standard 5 volts with positive internal polarity, so you should be able to find a "universal" charger to fit it, but the round DC port of the bottom of the device (at least they give you that rather than the iPAQ/XDA idea of charging exclusively through the sync port) is smaller in diameter than the port used for other PDAs. Even though it uses the same voltage and polarity as the iPAQ 3600/3700 series, chargers for those devices will not work on the V35. Other than Moonlight's chargers, the only accessories that are readily available are those from ViewSonic itself: a three pack of styli, an additional cradle -- unlike the H1910, the V35 gives you a big honkin' cradle in the box for your $299 -- and the keyboard. I've yet to see any aftermarket cases for the V35 (Hello, E&B, Vaja...). Fortunately the SD slot on the V35 is SDIO compliant -- well, compliant with one of the two competing SDIO implementations, anyway -- so it should be able to use SDIO peripherals without issue. I'm personally looking forward to SanDisk's 256MB/802.11b card due out this September so that I can add high-speed wireless without losing my additional storage memory*. It should also be possible to add a Bluetooth SD card for "bonding" the device to a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone like the Sony Ericsson T-68i for anytime/anywhere Internet access. Overall, I'm impressed, far more impressed than I thought I would be. The V35 may not be the perfect writer's PDA -- nothing is really perfect after all, and no two writers have exactly the same set of priorities -- but it's pretty darn good. The addition of WiFi -- I spend most of my time in places with free WiFi access -- will make almost as connected as my beloved XDA, while far smaller, lighter and more readable. Sounds like a winner to me. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! * The fact that the V35, like the H1910, uses NAND flash to store the OS is well documented by now, and ViewSonic even puts a sticker prominently on the outside of the box stating that the device only has 36MB of available memory due to the OS taking up the rest of the 64MB of RAM (they V37 will be the same in this respect). Like 32MB devices, the V35 pretty much requires a storage card for program and data storage, leaving as much of the internal memory free as possible for running programs. |