Great phone / PDA

I love my I-Mate JAM since getting it three months ago. The battery life is superb - much better than any of my previous phones. It can go for days without charge, and 72 hours of battery life are reserved so your PDA won’t lose any data if you do manage to drain it.

The worst part of the phone is the Windows Mobile operating system. Can be flakey at times, and some of the options are in strange places so certain things look to be designed by several different software teams that never talked to each other. Good once you get used to it though, although I have had to add quite a few third party freeware and shareware purchases in order to get decent functionality from the device. It’s good that you can do that easily and makes the device fun to own due to all the tweaks and software you can add to customise.

Good in theory, bad in practice

This device appears to do everything you'd want from a pocket computer. Unfortunately, it does almost everything badly. Here are some of the most annoying things:

1. It is terribly unresponsive, quite often not responding for seconds after trying to run or interact with a program.
2. Keyboard buffering is rather random, so sometimes your typing gets"forgotten"
3. The screen is reasonably bright, but with the tinted flip-lid down (i.e. when you take it out of your pocket to check something quickly) in sunlight it's unreadable. Making this lid tinted is so stupid (it just means you need to increase the screen brightness which makes the battery life even worse).
4. The mobile version of internet explorer fails to render most non-trivial pages correctly, making it largely useless. Opera mobile works very well, but you have to pay (after a trial), and it uses up valuable memory.
5. The pop3 client only recognises a fraction of my new emails to download - I can't trust it. It also fails to connect sometimes, for no apparant reason.
6. Using the alarm clock totally screws up the notification queue, making alarms go off when they're not set. So - if you set an alarm for 6am one Sunday morning, there's a danger that it will go off EVERY 6am Sunday morning. The only cure is a COMPLETE reset (wiping all installed programs/settings).
7. Active-sync doesn't store settings, so after a reset you need to sort everything out manually.
8. There's quite a lot of bloat in the read-only memory (powerpoint etc) - it would be nice to reclaim some of this for user memory.
9. Battery life is pretty bad (2 days max for my normal use) - FAR less than I'd get out of either a standard mobile phone and/or my old Palm PDA (which would last weeks).
10. 240x240 screen is really quite low resolution
11. I used to use my old Palm PDA as an instrument tuner, and it was spot-on. This thing doesn't seem to know how fast its internal clock is, so the tuner I"bought" (using free credit that comes with the IPAQ) is slightly (but significantly) out of tune.
12. Applications tend to be HUGE - Adobe pdf reader is 7MB for example!!
13. Navigation/interaction is frequently impossible without using the touch-screen (and thus lifting the lid) - very annoying.
14. Whilst the the development libraries needed to write applications for the device are free, they're limited to working only with the full version of MS Visual Studio (very expensive). Not being able to work around the limitations by writing my own software (and sharing it for free) for it is very frustrating.

There are some good things too of course, but you can read about those on the HP website! I bought this as a replacement for my simple mobile and Palm Tungsten T2 (which died after getting soaked). It just about does the job... but I end up cursing it very frequently, and if I lost it I would definitely not buy it again.

Expensive paper weight

I have had this item for 3 months now. It was purchased as a mobile device to help me manage my time, arrange meetings, keep contact adresses, take notes and make phone calls. The camera was a useful extra function.

It has been very disappointing in ALL aspects.

The phone is useless outside. The screen is a complete mirror and you have to guess at what you are photographing. You can then not see what you've taken because of the screen. You can use it to comb your hair though.

The diary is very poor. It puts a mark in each day you have an appointment. This means that most days have a mark in them but you have no idea whether it is a full day or what time the appointment is. You can only determine free time by looking at an individual day. Consequently, if that day is not free you have to scroll through day after day to find one. You are better of with an old fashined diary & a pen.

Synchronisation with PC's is flaky to say the least. I have lost count of the number of times it deleted contacts.

The use off Microsoft Office software (word / excel etc.) is also useless. Excell only fits in about 10 cells!

Character recognition doesn't work well despite hours of practice.

On top of all this the screen has broken. It has been treated with the utmost care and never used without the protective cover. Trying to get hold of customer support is frustrating in the extreme. Only contact method is by (expensive) telephone calls, HP Instant Support Professional Edition (which just does not work), or email. I await a reply from them.

I would not recommend purchasing this item.