HP iPAQ 2215

The HP iPAQ H2215 is a 400MHz Xscale-powered Windows Mobile PDA. It ships with Windows Mobile 2003 (Windows CE) and has an SDIO slot, a CompactFlash Type II slot, and bluetooth wireless functionality. The unit has a rotated 3.5" QVGA screen (240x320) which displays 16 bit color, and is powered by a 900 mAH Lithium-lon battery (or an optional 3600mAH battery which makes the unit quite a big larger.) All in all, this is a credible PDA, but I do wish it had WiFi.

I purchased this PDA because it was cheap (I got it on sale from geeks.com) and because it was capable of running Linux. Had I done a little more research I probably would have chosen another model, because it is actually a serious PITA to get Linux working on it — my system has been sitting at the boot screen where it hung during boot for days, acting as a night light because I have been busy with other projects. It does not support the haret boot loader used by basically all other models, and so you must boot with LAB, a boring and broken boot loader that has no facility for debugging output but a serial cable (ever heard of USB, guys? it's here) and which often fails to boot up either the Gnome-based GPE environment or the Qt-based OPIE environment provided by Familiar Linux.

You won't want to run Windows Mobile, either, or at least I didn't; It's not until Windows Mobile 5, the version following the version included on this handheld, that Windows CE becomes worth a damn. Windows mobile 5 gets substantial performance improvements, a GPS sharing daemon, and all kinds of other goodies - not to mention that software being written today is usually only built against Windows Mobile 5. The unit was fairly reliable under Windows, although some aspects of the system leave a lot to be desired. The file manager is slow and pathetic, for example, and the included media player (a mobile version of Windows Media Player or "WiMP") is truly pathetic and you will want to replace it as quickly as possible.

If you do manage to get Linux running on the system, you will find that everything but Bluetooth support is excellent - there is no distribution of Linux which has decent Bluetooth support yet. This is actually an area of computing that is highly sketchy on Windows as well, though; I had to play all kinds of tricks to get it working properly on Windows XP. I'm not sure what it's like in Vista, but given the driver situation over there, I can only shudder. On the other hand, a lot of hardware support is somewhat problematic. I purchased a Sandisk 128MB+WiFi CF card, and it worked great under Windows, but in order to use the networking under Linux you have to not only build your own kernel (a process not for the faint of heart, as familiar linux makes it much harder than it should be) but you can only use the flash memory OR the WiFi at once, not both as you can under Windows Mobile. Make sure that whatever you buy has adequate drivers. I was also unable to use my Seagate 8MB CF Microdrive in the PDA; your mileage may vary, but I've seen lots of people asking if they work, and no one saying that they do.

All in all, if you can pick this PDA up cheap, it's worthy. It has a nice looking screen. Warning, though: the rubber grips on the side WILL wrinkle and pull out of the case over time. I've heard you can open the unit and trim them to fix them...