[JASJAR, XDA Exec, MDA Pro General] joebongo:
I have put in some comments below, hih!

Downside of JasJar:

Big n bulky meant that I kept on putting it down - and losing it! And if one more cheeky bastard commented on my retro brick...

---Little difference between this and the PDA2K in size

I pretty much stopped reading eBooks. Read 120 in 1 year on the PDA2 and raved about it, but on the JJ it was tough to hold in bed, and the buttons were too small to page down easily. I just faded on that which is rather sad.

---I have read at the same rate since going from other PDA's to Universal, but I do it in landscape.

Hinge was definitely working loose. A post I've made covers tightening it up by bending the plate, but I'm not sure where the end game of this falls...

---Yeah, the jury's out on this one

In SA, it's way expensive (given that I lose them every 3 months). However, I'm going to the UK end January, perhaps I can get a cheap one and unlock it? Or is it not cheap given the contract? I think I can use UK addresses and banking details to get a contract, or do they require more than that? Thoughts anyone?

Software: So few games work well! And we still havn't solved the GPRS/3G traffic counting issue

---spb GPRS monitor?

Battery: Daily charging was indeed a ball-ache.

---Switch off 3G

Radio quality: Hell this sucked! Now that I'm using an old Nokia, I'm trully understanding how bad all iMate radio stacks are! And BT gave so much trouble that I wondered if it was better without; crackling, echo, etc etc despite testing 3 top-end BT headsets. Still, the JAM is not that much better.

---It's a tradeoff I guess for all the extra tech inside

Stability: Let's face it, despite all our work to free up memory, close apps, run lean-n-mean, the damned thing was still dicky. You had to reset every few days at best, how many times did you look at the screen and see that the call you made 25 minutes ago was still in progress (Hell, what have I just been saying about the dickhead I was chatting to??), and altho I was a storng advicate of it being usable with a little effort, the truth is was that it was never as fast as the PDA2

---Not as quick to the eye, but also seems to be ok in real use. I get about one reset a week at the moment with my minimal install

Upside of JasJar

IIWPO likely to stay in memory. However, JAM allows for ROM hacking to secure this, and my JasJar hasn't phoned home in 3 days. I'm now figuring out that the issue is not whether thieves have the ability to hard reset, but rather whether they are intelligent enough to track down a charger for this new device - I think not!

---Tea leaves only need a mini-USB lead to charge it. Now as they are likely to be on crack I guess they sold their computers already. Might take some time to have it phone home. You can inactivate the device to all through the IMEI number

Persistent storage: But in truth I was better off backing up the PDA2 as at least I could recover when it was lost. Now it's gone, all I have is my Outlook backup - no eWallet, no notes, no s.sht that I spent so long working on to justify my SL55 to the wife (and I was oh-so-close to succeeding...)!

3G! Yep, that was AWESOME. I used mine as a modem frequently, and with data rates in SA being so low, it was a truly workable alternative. However, I didn;t really use it for browsing (IE browser renders SO slowly with bad bad caching), and for email I only d/l headers which can be done on a JAM's GPRS. So, why not a JAM with an EDGE or 3G PCMCIA laptop card?

Keyboard! Loved it! But in truth I didn;t use it as much as I expected. The occasional email where I could nto wait to get back to my laptop, and quite frankly if I'm that desperate, why not use SBP Full Screen keyboard?

---Learn to love landscape. I don't use portrait ever these days.

VGA: LOVED my slick WAD desktop with oh-so-glossy pic of my CLK55, but in truth I was the only one who ever looked at it and I get to see the real thing every day anyway! VGA browsing via Oz was kewl, but browsing was slow. Terminal Services was AWESOME, and I think that's probably my main concern. Loved getting into my eMule server and seeing how it was doing - or grabbing an eBook within 5 mins of being told about it!

Media player in VGA: Yeah, I liked that. But in truth the PDA2 was more stable for running mp3 playing apps, so it's pretty video vs mp3 - in truth the mp3 got used more - tho neither were used all that much.

---PDA2K has a 'pop' on MP3 playback - the reason I couldn't stick with it.

Landscape: Naah - this was never a useful thing for me.

---Learn to love it.