[JASJAR, XDA Exec, MDA Pro General] HeartOfDarkness:
lol That was exactly my point. :-)

Well, exactly what I said in my previous post, and what Preditor ends his with: the Uni, whichever standpoint you look at it from, is unique on the market. Nothing even comes close, not when it came out, not even now, a year after its mass availability to the public.

Where did you see it's not completly bt-specifications compliant ? Even I who has problems with BT (the "disconnects randomly" thing), can't complain much about BT quality and features. And I tried a variety of BT peers with the Uni, everything worked as expected. And even my random disconnections, I know are a result of my flashing to the latest ROMs, since I didn't have that problem before. And I know of no other modern apparels that do not have the slightest trace of a bug in their firmwares... Even when they integrate far less technology than the Uni...

I have, actually. And compared to photos taken with Sony Ericsson's T900's, T910s, for instance, they're top notch...

There's noise all right, but I wonder what phones you're talking about. Two years ago, almost all phones came equiped with extraordinarily crappy optics, completly outdated CMOS sensors, and almost all of them VGA...

Of course they are. And aside from that, they are not PDA-phones, they're simple PDAs...

Before I flashed my ROMs to the latest WWE, I had used my Universal with its headset without a single glitch. Not even one. And I was actually amazed at my Wifi sensitivity, which was on par with my top-of-the-line IBM ThinkPad, and far superior to HP, Siemens and other top-notch *laptops*.

I guess it's all a matter of experience and luck, but it would seem that not only is your web-cam very good, your Uni may have a faulty hardware...

And you can't judge an equipment on the feedback of these forums or others, since it usually represents a "loud minority" of people who experience problems with their items...

I don't know, as I said, I didn't find mine to be blunt. Granted, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they do get the job of cutting stuff done. And as long as it's able to cut your meat, why care about your knife's sharpness compared to other knives' ?

Actually, your choice of the knives example is excellent. I consider the Universal to be the swiss-knife of PDAs. The Axim may be a Buck knife, but what good is it for you when you want to cork a bottle out ? Or saw off a branch ?

Thanks to the Uni, I don't look like Batman anymore, with his belt full of different pockets and apparels. I have only one, and it's in my work-case, and in my pocket there's only the tiny headset. And it keeps me up to speed with my schedule. And it synchronizes perfectly with my Outlook. And it allows me to surf the web almost as comfortably as my laptops, anywhere, and in a few seconds only. Etc. etc. What's not to love ? :-)

I cannot of course speak for all areas in the world. But when the Unicame out in France, the only PDA equipped with the 624 MHz proc. was the Axim. And it was on pre-order. Some web-shops had published the page for the HP I-don't-remember-what, but that also was on pre-order. If on any kind of order.

On top of that, those PDAs where pretty much 75% as expensive as the Uni.

Of course, France is not the ultimate place to get the goodies first, or at the best price (hardly), but well, I do speak for myself only. :-)

All right. The 4700 is slightly better. But is the screen on the Uni. bad ? Clearly not IMHO.

So I'm tempted to say: "the screen on the 4700 is slightly better. So what ?".

Finally, if you go this way, I suggest you check out the 3 years old Sony Clié VZ-90. Its OLED screen simply "buries" *anything* you can throw at me in the PocketPC world. And that was pretty much the last of the Clié line... My previous PDA, the Clié TH-55 (european version with wifi), a 5 years old PDA, has a better screen, higher resolution, better embedded camera than almost all *current* PocketPCs, flawless wifi, and a dreamy two-weeks of heavy use battery life. All in a package 40% slimer than the Axim... I can tell you that if I'd been able to upgrade it to phone functionnalities, I'd still be using my TH-55...

IMHO, PocketPC is *not* the ideal PDA platform. But since it's won the PDA-platforms war, the Uni is IMHO the best embodiement of what the PocketPC platform has to offer.

Right. But you still can connect (pending a minor manipulation) to g-only networks. And I challenge you to prove me that a "fully wifi g" PDA makes for smoother web-surfing than on a Uni...

lol Even to this day, BT 2.0 apparels are almost non-existent !

And as I said, in France at least, when the Uni came out, I cannot think of a single headset (for instance), that was BT 2.0. The first largely available BT 2.0 item here was the Plantronics Pulsar pair of earphones, and even now, they're expensive and not so easy to get.

It has an incredible amount of features. So I'll agree with you that it has an incredible amount of things to perfect. But even now... As cmonex very aptly put it... Nothing "even comes close".

PS: everything's IMHO of course. :-)

EDIT: typos.

EDIT, BIS: I see you're in Hong Kong, Chatbox. I can understand your grievances better , since you must see very good stuff on your shores, that alas never actually reach ours... For us in France, the Uni clearly is "as good as it gets" when it comes to PDAs...

EDIT, TER: have you seen, on the site you provided the link to, the framerate benchmark between the Uni and the HP and other Asus ? One cannot say there's such a HUGE difference in the framerate, for Div5 playback.... And the picture samples aren't, aside from the over-exposed one (and I'll grant you that the Uni's camera gets overexposed really easily), so bad, they even are actually pretty good: no visible deformation, no discoloration on the edges... It's not excellent, but nowhere near "sub-par" IMHO....