Are You a Newbie?
Let’s face it, at one point or another you’ve gone into a store like Best Buy or even Wal-Mart shopping for electronics of some sort. You get there and are faced with a wall of choices and then it hits you– you have no fucking idea what you’re looking at. All you know is you want to buy a *insert item here* and you don’t want a piece of crap.
So you end up tracking down whatever kid that works there and try to understand the electro-gibberish that comes spewing out of their mouth when you ask for help. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do a little pre-search (my made up word for pre shopping research) so when you go in you have a bit of a background on what you’re looking at and a mental list of things to look for?
I found a site to help do just that! Electronics Newbie is a neat little site that offers semi-in-depth overviews on all sorts of electronics. From Digital Cameras, Video Games, Speaker Systems and everything in between they give you run downs of what’s good to know when buying your new toy. They also offer reviews on many types of each product they talk about. Go check ‘em out:
http://electronics.newbie.org
The Hotness and I are looking to buy a PDA to keep him organized so I’m totally hitting up their section on Handheld PDAs before we hit the stores. The Newbie site also has sections for Computers and even a section for the Internet in case you need a crash course on those fields as well 
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Don’t forget about my lovely renter Jane, she’d love to have you over for a visit so clickity click wouldja?
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Morgan said:
on August 17, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Get a Dell Axim or a HP/Compaq Ipaq there the bes ton the market both available online and offfer loads of stuff. google them and see what u find best to go for the ones with wifi and bluetooth which will let u add a GPS reciever at a later date for some sat nav, also SD or CF slots are the key as that is some cheap memory for storage of files picture movies etc…
Axim or ipaq u know the way
franky said:
on August 17, 2006 at 3:04 pm
LOL, those posts are always funny… Cause everyone would have another advice.
Asses what you exactly want to use the PDA for and what specs you need. You find great deals at ebay on older models, fe Sony Clie’s. Even new ones (although they aren’t produced anymore).
By assessing correctly and buying a ’slow’ Clie, I won 300USD
And maybe mine isn’t that fast, fancy… but it does everything perfectly. Now if only I managed it to get organized!?!?
vern said:
on August 17, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Is he interested in having a PocketPC Phone?
I have owned 9 PDAs, 2 of them being Palm platform and the rest Windows of one version or another, the last 2 being phone models, and the 3rd to last being an iPaq with a module to make it a phone.
There are advantages to using the phone model, but, as always, there are disadvantages as well.
If you are interested in using the device at any time for media playback, be sure to get one that supports the stereo headset profile for bluetooth, or can be modded to be compatible.
If he goes with a PocketPC (as opposed to a Palm device) and you are looking for an older model, at least be sure to get Windows Mobile 2003 SECOND EDITION. It’s a major improvement over the first iteration of that operating system.
If you go eBay, avoid buying any devices that don’t have the battery or the original wall charger and/or cradle. They aren’t prohibitively expensive, but it’s harder to insure that the device was properly tested if they don’t have those things.
Price doesn’t always determine functionality or compatibility.
E.G. Franky’s Clie; $300 is more than I would pay for any PDA, and is 50% more than I paid for my PocketPC Phone, and has considerably more functionality.
Alternatively, there are Windows- and Palm-based PDAs available for less than I paid for my unit that offer equivalent or close to equivalent functionality.
If you use a Mac, it’s almost a given that you won’t be able to synch your Windows-vased PDA. That’s not entirely true, but most people who use a Mac (that I know, anyway) have never been successfully able to make it work. I have done it for them, but that’s another story.
If he wants to synch with his computer, it’s important to consider WHAT he will be synching. Certain devices are better than others for certain things.
For another perspective on funtionality, there is the Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager, a unique device that combines a PDA with a portable hard drive. It’s got bluetooth and WiFi and a 4GB hard drive built-in that can be used as an external drive.
This is a concept I would like to see duplicated in the Windows side, since I prefer the Windows Mobile OS to the PalmOS.
In an entirely different conversation you can consider the usability and practicality of a Linux-based PDA. There are a couple that come with linux installed and many more which can be made to run linux. Both require a typically high level of technical know-how.
I’ve run real long here, so I’ll stop now. However, if you or TH would like to talk more about it, I’d be happy to help.
I’m not the be-all, end-all, but I am pretty well informed…