Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
And today's thing is the Hewlett-Packard iPAQ RX1950 PDA, released in September
of 2005 for an asking price of $299. More specifically though this is a brand new
in box, still sealed example of the rather special model known as the RX1955! Well okay, calling it "special" is a bit of an exaggeration here. What I mean is that it
holds special meaning to *ME* being that it was my first PDA, or personal digital
assistant. The only real difference between the RX1950 and 1955 is that the
former was sold on a corporate market and the latter was sold at retail. And
speaking of retail, PDAs were at the height of their popularity in the mid
2000s and I'd had my mind set on getting one for years by 2005. This one stood out
to me for several reasons back then but let's get to some context first. I was
19 years old in 2005, just starting college, and found myself working odd
jobs all over town. The main things I wanted to do were take notes, listen to
MP3s, browse the web through Wi-Fi, and of course I wanted to play some games while
not smiling. Nowadays it's easy enough to just grab a tablet or a smartphone and
be done with it but back then, nah man. Tablets were way too expensive and
cumbersome and my cell phone was one of these beauties: an LG VX6100. Not exactly
a productivity powerhouse with its resolution of 96 x 64. But hey it had a
VGA camera, that was neat! So with my needs in mind and the technology
available, my two real options in 2005 were a laptop or a PDA. And while a laptop fit
most of my needs I didn't really have the money to get the ones I wanted and
the idea of hauling something that large to class in my already stuffed backpack
was not appealing. So that led me to the iPAQ RX1955, which at the time was one
of HP's entry-level PDAs. They had a whole range of iPAQ devices back then
and to be honest, I found most of them pretty ugly. But not the RX1955. Right on
the front of the box you can see why I chose this model: not only did it look
sleek and stylish but it had built-in Wi-Fi, ran Windows Mobile 5,
and featured SDIO card expandability. These were three things I had almost no
experience with at that point and I was highly intrigued by the possibilities of
being able to put my files and MP3s on an SD card and mess around with all that
kind of stuff. But also with Windows Mobile and the whole Pocket PC ecosystem, and using Windows with a touchscreen was super appealing to me at the time. And
hey check out that Samsung logo on the box, what's that about?
Well the RX1950 series made use of a 300 megahertz Samsung SC32442,
which was a 32-bit multi stacked package, based on the ARM920T core, that
integrated a wide array of CPU, memory, and I/O functions into a single chip 14
millimeters across. The result was that it may not have been the fastest chip of
its day but it was relatively cheap and drew little power. Enough technical
details for the moment, it's time to break that seal after it's languished in
some overstocked warehouse for 13 years! [satisfying yet soft box-cutting noises] Oh yeah, this is exciting! I sold off my
original rRX1955 forever ago so I haven't seen this stuff in ages! Atop the
first layer of packaging is the documentation, shrink-wrapped for your
protection, as well as this informative quick start guide on the underside of
the box lid, and an equally informative but less necessary section on the front
advertising several of the optional accessories you could buy from HP. And on
the second layer down you get a neat little tray holding the iPAQ itself
and, man. Just holding this again immediately brings back memories. Although it seems a bit smaller than I remember somehow, but actually that's probably
just because I'm used to using gargantuan 7-inch smartphones these days. Next you get the USB sync and charging cable, the power adapter, the battery, and
a simple fabric carrying case. Let's go ahead and open up that documentation
bundle before going further though, starting with the manual that looks more
substantial than it really is. There are only about 45 pages of it per language
and most of what it contains can be learned just by using the device and its
built-in tutorials. You also receive a "Getting Started CD," which contains the
software to sync it with a Windows PC and all that kind of stuff. You also get
another ad for more HP products and accessories, including some lovely-looking
leather cases that I still kind of want. As well as some information on
warranties and end-user license agreements that I, of course, absolutely
read cover to cover. And hey look, another ad, this one for audible.com. Nyeh-heh, yeah not sponsored. Man they just have not let off the gas have they?
And yes that free month still applies but only because they've never stopped
giving away free months to anything that moves. And hey look, yet another ad, this
time for Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine. Yeah they must have just
rebranded it when they printed this, I remember when it was just called Pocket
PC Magazine for a while. Well enough of that, time for some plastic peeling perfection! [crinkly, sticky, plastic-removal sounds] Ah that feels right. And because I can't
wait to play with this again let's just plug in the battery and see if it works. [battery insertion noises commence, suspense rising in anticipation of its first power-on] It does! Although it'll certainly need
some charging still, though the battery held enough juice all this time to get
through the initial setup. Stuff like calibrating the touch screen and setting
the time of day. Sweet. So to get this thing charged up using the wall adapter
we'll need both that and the Active Sync cable because there's nowhere to plug
this in directly from the wall to the iPAQ. That goes in the bottom there
and then this whole thing plugs into the PDA. You *can* also charge it directly
through USB with a newer third-party cable, but from the factory you did need
both cables combined to get power. This was pretty normal for PDAs like this. On the top from left to right you get a three-and-a-half millimeter headphone
jack, a spot to plug in SD or MMC cards, and a spot to store your stylus, which is
pretty necessary. This doesn't have a capacitive touchscreen, you will be
pressing down to get things to work. And I always kind of liked how it has this
fake SD card, I guess to keep the slot from getting dirt and crap in there. And
instead of putting a little protector on top they were just like, "here's a blank
piece of plastic to put in there." So turning it on is as simple as pressing
the 'on' button. And you get these two LEDs up at the top: the left one is the Wi-Fi
indicator and the right one shows if it's charging or needs charging. And on
the bottom you get some physical buttons. Mostly they're for shortcuts to
applications, but by default holding down this one actually
changes the screen orientation from portrait to landscape mode, a handy
little thing indeed since this doesn't have any accelerometers or anything to
do that automatically. Along the right hand side here you'll see this little
silver switch which is for opening the battery bay. That's really all that does.
On the left-hand side you'll see this little cassette tape symbol beside this
button here, and pressing that immediately opens up the voice recording
mode. And yes this does have a microphone built-in. [low quality recoding plays back]
"This is a direct recording from
the iPAQ. Not the greatest microphone I've ever heard, but not the worst either."
Along the bottom is where you plug in your Active Sync cable and you also get
this little port here for IrDA. This is the infrared interface so if you had any
software that, say, acted as a virtual remote control you can actually control
your TV, your A/V receiver, anything with infrared that can be programmed. And you
could use your PDA as a smart remote which was pretty awesome in 2005. Okay so let's dive into the interface, and really the Windows Mobile Pocket PC experience
for a bit, because this is not only something that intrigued me a whole lot
nearly 2000s but it really kind of still does. I enjoy seeing Windows crammed into a smaller environment like this and comparing it to the desktop experience. I
mean, you still get a Start Menu, you still have a control panel full of all
the settings that you would expect. In fact, some things that you might *not*
expect, depending on your expectations. Like the
ability to remap every single one of the buttons on this thing, except for the
power button of course. So if you want to swap anything to pretty much anything
else, yeah, you can do that. You can make a dedicated Solitaire button if you want to,
doesn't matter, it lets you do it. This is also where you can apply all sorts of
battery-saving options, brightness settings, things like that. Although due
to the hardware that this uses, like I mentioned earlier, the battery life is
really good. At least on a fresh battery back in the day, you could get over 9
even up to 10 hours of battery life depending on what you're doing. In my
experience, this older battery, it only holds about three or four hours but
still not terrible considering this is a 1,100 mAH battery from 2005.
Something that is not so cool though about the RX1955 is the memory
situation. It came with a 64 megabyte ROM
as well as 32 megs of SDRAM. But yeah it doesn't leave you with a whole lot, so
having a half-decent SD card in there is absolutely a requirement as far as I'm
concerned. And again if you're familiar with the Windows environment and
navigating all that kind of stuff then the File Explorer acts very much like
Windows Explorer. And you have plenty of familiar folders like My Documents,
Program Files, Temp, and Windows. And any SD or MMC cards that you insert will
show up as a folder in here. As for all the applications that came on the
1955 it's pretty much your generic PDA type stuff. You get a calendar for doing
calendar-scheduling things, you get a contacts list for adding contacts to
your list, mostly for email because this is not a smartphone -- you can't call
anyone or text anyone. But if you wanted to communicate in some way, either
directly to another iPAQ or over the Internet, you can do that. You also get a
calculator for doing very specific calculations, and then you have Pocket
MSN. And I actually did use this back in the day for a little bit because I had
Hotmail at one point. You also get a Notes app where you can handwrite in
your own notes here. And yes it does have handwriting recognition which actually
it was pretty accurate, I was always impressed with how well that it handled
my sloppy handwriting. This version of Windows Mobile 5 also came with some
pretty basic Microsoft Office suite programs, such as PowerPoint Mobile which
doesn't actually let you create powerpoints, but if you had any that you
put on your SD card then you could view them. And you also got Word Mobile, which
is an incredibly simple word processor. And that was fine although
typing on this little tiny screen is just not something you wanted to do,
especially in my case. I was at school, I wanted to use this thing for taking
notes in class, and I did. But usually I would just write it in the Notes app. Or
what I did is actually got one of those fold-out keyboards. I don't have that
anymore but it would plug in the Active Sync thing and kind of created a little
cradle situation. But yeah, don't expect a whole lot in terms of customization or
formatting of your documents, you get a grand total of two fonts: Tahoma
or Courier New. That's it, no Word Art here. But hey, no Clippy either so you
take your wins where you can get them. Even more limited
though is Excel Mobile. I can't imagine anyone ever did any kind of serious work
with spreadsheets on this little screen. I would hate to actually make a
substantial spreadsheet on this. It's okay for doing edits to existing ones I
suppose. Now let's get to some of the more enjoyable, fun applications like
Windows Media Player, which of course lets you play media like MP3s and WMA
files. [LGR's 'Watto Cantina Hum' remix plays over tinny PDA speakers] That was a huge reason that I wanted a PDA, I never had an iPod. I've still
never had an iPod. So I was always interested in devices like this that let
me do all sorts of things in addition to playing MP3s. And you could also view and
do some very basic image manipulation with photographs, stuff like rotating and
cropping and that's about it. And yes there actually was a camera add-on for
this device, which I never had. I would still like to get one just to try it out.
But yeah it was pretty neat to be able to take photos around with you like this,
especially with digital cameras back then. I mean my HP digital camera had a
one-inch display in 2005, so this one being almost four inches was pretty
awesome. It also made it pretty great for watching back video files in the Windows
Media Video format. [LGR video about the Tapwave Zodiac plays, still over those tinny PDA speakers] The speaker is not particularly great but it was pretty cool with headphones. And you know, it's a 320x240 resolution screen, that's not
a massive amount or anything but it doesn't really need it. This is a three
point seven inch diagonal screen and it's in 16-bit color. The pixel density
is really not that bad, I definitely watched a few episodes of
Prison Break on this back in the day. And then finally there's the wireless
capability of this thing, which comes in the form of built-in Wi-Fi. And no, this
does not have Bluetooth, which a lot of reviewers dinged this device for back in
the day but I didn't really care about Bluetooth. Wi-Fi it was all I cared about
and this iPAQ came with 802.11b support built-in. Still totally usable depending
on the network you're trying to connect to, but I've found that there are quite a
few places and devices that no longer broadcast an 802.11b signal and stick
to G or N. But an even bigger issue can be the wireless encryption
and more often than not this is a real roadblock seeing as this device predates
WPA2 being mandatory. It doesn't seem to support it at all so you have to find
something with WPA, WEP, or just no encryption at all. And you can probably
get around that issue at home with your own router but connecting to public
Wi-Fi in coffee shops or random businesses is a real toss-up. Most spots
I tried don't have the right signal, don't use a supported encryption method,
or they require a login webpage that the iPAQ didn't know what to do with,
treating what should be clickable buttons as text. Or not loading at all,
sometimes even crashing the program. Heck it'll do that when you're just trying to
load any number of modern websites. The browser in general is just too outdated
to be very usable, it won't even load Google or anything with HTTPS. And really,
this browser sucked in 2005 as well, which is why I ended up installing Opera
for Pocket PCs even back then. Well that's enough of that, let's move on to the
gaming side of things. Starting with the two rather lackluster games that it comes
pre-installed with, the first one being Microsoft Solitaire. Which is just
Solitaire. And Bubble Breaker, which is one of these things where you just kind
of try to pop as many objects together as you can. As long as there are two are
more connected then you can pop them. And that's it, incredibly basic games that
does not do this device justice whatsoever. Because really the RX1955,
and all sorts of Pocket PCs from the mid 2000s, are quite capable gaming machines. And of course getting games on there often meant that you had to plug it into
a PC and get it going that way. This is the CD that it came with installing
under Windows XP and once that gets going, Active Sync will do its thing and
sync any of your information on your PC that you tell it to. Or you can use it as
an interface between your iPAQ and any downloaded programs that you want to
install onto the machine. Or if you don't want to do it that way or if your
program, say, came in a CAB file -- which a lot of homebrew and more illegitimate
packages do -- then you can just open up the Pocket PC right in Windows Explorer
and then just copy and paste the CAB files and then open them directly from
the iPAQ. And there you go, it's not gonna ask for much of any verification.
It might say, "oh unknown publisher," but there's nothing stopping you from
installing pretty much anything you want on this thing. So yeah let's just check
out a few of the games that I bought or demoed back in the day starting with the
official port of SimCity 2000. [SimCity 2000 theme music plays all happily] I actually bought this physically, I believe it was a Best Buy or something. They had a whole section of Pocket PC games and software
that you could buy boxed for a few years. And yeah, this one in particular SimCity
2000 is pretty good. That pixel art looks fantastic on this little tiny screen and
you know what? It plays pretty well. Probably runs it better than my 66
megahertz 486 did back in the day really. I was also really fond of a lot of the
Astraware games, in particular the ones from PopCap. You know before they became microtransaction-laden, free-to-play garbage. Games like Bejeweled 2 were
pretty great because it was really just the same game as you would get on a
desktop PC but in a handheld format. And that was so cool, at least for the time.
And I really liked playing it with the stylus. In fact, pretty much any game that
was meant to be played with a mouse pointer is great with a stylus -- if not
better sometimes -- because you get really direct control such as with PopCap's and
Astraware's version of Zuma. In fact the control is so precise that it almost
makes the gameplay trivial. You just point and tap to wherever you want your
balls to go. So yeah I ended up spending a lot of time downloading and trying out
all of the Astraware games. And then there were independent, freely-released
homebrew games like Wolfenstein 3D here. This one just comes with the shareware
version but you can install the full one as well if you had the files to go with
it. And yeah it's a pretty darned accurate port of Wolfenstein,
it's really only held back by the control scheme here. And that only makes
sense, that little directional pad on the bottom of the unit is just not made for
moving around in games. For one thing it has a button in the middle of it so if
you try to rock it around with your finger you end up pressing the button,
which activates something else -- it just doesn't feel good at all anyway. And
since you don't have any buttons on the other side of the unit, either on the top
or the right in this case, you have to tap on the screen to do things like fire
and open doors. And it's kind of novel and it friggin works, but that's about it.
You'd really want to plug in a keyboard if you were gonna play these games for
any length of time. And the same goes for emulators, of which, yes there were a ton
for Windows Mobile and Pocket PCs. And they were pretty capable due to the
hardware, this one right here is Pocket Nester, which allows you to play NES and
Famicom games. And you know what, it does a pretty good job. Again the problem is
the control scheme. These buttons are just not made for gaming. Again it's not
like a modern phone, it's not a capacitive touchscreen, you don't get
multi-touch at all. So it just doesn't make sense for any kind of virtual key
or controller layout. But yeah that's pretty much it for the iPAQ RX1955!
A machine that I am very fond of at this point but you know what?
Back in 2006 -- or really I guess 2007 -- well let's just say the honeymoon period
didn't last very long. I think I had this thing for about six, seven months and
then I was like "nah man." I sold it off and bought myself a Blackberry Pearl [chuckles!] Because honestly the screen was just too small to do any kind of serious work in
class or anywhere for that matter. I ended up just taking notes on paper and
then using a Blackberry for things like MP3s and keeping a calendar and contacts
list and doing Wi-Fi all that. And besides it had a data plan and I could
just use mobile internet through, I guess it was Suncom at that point and then
they moved onto T-Mobile. But anyway the BlackBerry did really most of what I
wanted on the iPAQ, other than the games. And for the games I ended up
buying myself a PSP-2000. [sounds of bowling pins falling over] And that just satisfied me for a long time, as far as doing portable gaming with physical controls and a lot of support for
homebrew software. Like, it's so easy to softmod one of those things and yeah.
With a Blackberry and a PSP that just didn't make sense to hold on to the iPAQ for very long. But it is still something that I absolutely have had a
blast going back to mess with now, which brought a very healthy dose of happy nostalgia in equal parts with a healthy dose of reality and why I got rid of it in
the first place. Still though, it's kind of reignited my passion for Pocket PCs and
now I'm looking at some of the others back then that would have been even
better options. And I'm sure I'll be revisiting these kind of mid-2000s
mobile devices in the future so if you enjoyed this video I definitely
recommend sticking around. I have another couple in the works already, one
is from palm and one is from Sweden let's put it that way. But anyway enough
of this ramble for this video, and I thank you very much for watching!
This, kids, is why the iPhone was such a sensation when it launched. Look where we were come from. Sure, there was some improvement in the intervening two years, and yeah, it would be a whole before touchscreen phones caught up to PDAs in some areas - I held on to my Blackberry 8830 and its glorious keyboard until it literally couldn't operate anymore. But the iPhone was like something out of science fiction when it came out, especially once the App Store opened. It really changed the game.
I still have mine somewhere. The only thing I ever did on it was play transport tycoon :)
I thought these were so cool in the early 2000s, but by 2005, the novelty had sorta waned I think.