[Advantage X7500, MDA Ameo General] HeartOfDarkness:
Ok. But the thing is: from the start, and there can be no doubt about it, the Athena buyer *knows* that there is no embedded earpiece, just like he / she knows that it is big and heavy. You therefore cannot base your judgement on the entire telephony function of the Athena based on something that it isn't supposed to do. It's like saying a car's steering functions are crappy because it cannot turn at right angles ! Had you said that WITH the wired headphone, telephony was sub-par, THEN I would have understood your point, if not agreed with it.

I now understand that. But if you were not willing to use the provided wired headset, do you realise then that the Athena was NOT designed for your needs from the very moment you read its technical specifications ?

I don't systematically re-encode everyting I view on my Athena either. I usually do it more to save storage space than anything else, and because for some things, I like things "optimised", lol. :-)

And by the way, that IS a great thing I like about the video playback functionnalities of a PocketPC device. Using TCPMP, you can throw pretty much everything at the goon and be able to play it "as is". Sometimes it may not come out perfect, but that is more exception than anyting else. On the other hand, even specialised devices like the Archos sometimes, or even usually, need re-encoding.

I don't know about the N95, but with the N92 I had a few days, I did have to re-encode most of my vids in order to play them on the smallish screen.

I don't carry the keyboard and mouse with me all the time, and that's another great thing about the Athena: on a day to day basis, I usually don't even use the provided keyboard. I leave it at work to act as a stand for my Athena (a few tens of Euros saved, in my opinion, from being spent on a third party charging stand), and to type in SMS and other short messages for which it is largely sufficient.

But the Athena + mini-BT-keyboard + mini-mouse beats any laptop, even UMPCs, for functionnality, ease of use, and room when it comes to typing in reports "on the go", whether in the train or anywhere else. Do you realise what alternative you give me for that ? Subnotebook + Kaiser / N95 + dongles + memory cards ? How is that more efficient, whether for the room it takes, or how much it costs ? How about convenience: one "on" pressed on my athena, and everything works right away, compared to turning on all devices, waiting for the laptop to boot, connecting stuff and waiting once again, transfering data from here ot there, etc.

Well, not exactly, LOL ! I've had the Athena for a little less than a year, and had a Hermes for a few months before that, and a Universal for about a year and a half before that, etc etc. Actually, my first PDA I got was around 1995, a state of the art and oh-so-slim Palm M500. Although arguably, the Universal was my first PocketPC PDA. I was a die-hard Palm addict up until then with my Clié TH-55, which I still use on occasion as it is still, 5 years after it came out, one of the best non-phone PDA I know of.

And as I said, having the Hermes after the Universal felt like long-winded and relentless torture to me. How people can browse the web (especially if it is rendered correctly), view videos, or use GPS software on such small-screened devices, with such low resolutions as QVGA simply is beyond me. You can't fit anything on the Today screen, you can't fit, all in all, anything anywhere on such screens, lol.

Got rid of it for an Athena as soon as I could.

lol Anyway, as you said, there's no hard feelings, everyone's entitled to his or her opinion. I just like to argue and love to prove people wrong. =P ;-) lol