1. Compared to the Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 718 / 720, the major advantage of the hx4700 is the sheer existence of a WM5 / WM6 / WM6.1 upgrade. On top of that, the larger screen, the quality magnesium casing and the faster CPU with a graphics co-processor greatly helping in playing back MPEG4 Part 2 (a.k.a. ASP / DivX / XviD) videos, on the long run, made it the winner (while this wasn't certain back in 2004-2005; the author of this article has also chosen, back then, the Loox 720 over the hx4700). Of course, it has had major problems compared to the Loox: the touchpad, initially, the higher price, the very low speaker volume (while the Loox has been one of the loudest ever PDA’s around), the lack of a camera (even if the one in the 720 isn’t anything to write home about, quality-wise) and the lack of USB host support. These problems, however, are easily mitigated by the really excellent WM6.1 upgrades released in the last few months. As the Loox isn’t upgradable to WM5, several current software titles (like Esmertec Jbed to run MIDlets like Opera Mini) just can’t be run on it.
2. It’s too better than the Dell Axim x50v/x51v. The Dell has vastly inferior battery life, much-much worse screen almost useless in Landscape for many users because of the major polarization issues, the plastic, thick body and the x50v WM5 upgrade having major compaction issues (as was the case with pre-WM6.1 hx4700 upgrades, though). The only real advantage, in addition to the louder buzzer, th emore gaming-friendly D-pad controller and (at least in the U.S.) lower price of the Dell is the Intel 2700G support, offering both excellent 3D hardware acceleration and great help in playing back ASP videos.

As promised in my previous article, I’ve taken a deep look at the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrades for the Dell Axim x51v, HP iPAQ hx4700, HTC Universal and HTC Wizard. All the reviewed ROM versions are based on Windows Mobile 5.2.19209 (Build 19209.1.0.2). I run some VERY thorough SDHC conformance tests because, unfortunately, most (as far as the reviewed models are concerned, all – note that, in this regard, I haven’t tested the Universal) plain WM5 / WM6 devices can NOT be easily made SDHC-compliant. This means you MUST upgrade these devices to some of the newer ROMs (including the ones I’ve reviewed) in order to gain SDHC support. Note that I’ve devoted a separate section (at the end) to my test results showing the results of my trying to “hack” the non-WM6.1 ROM-based devices to accept SDHC cards with the latest hacks available.

When the first WM5 devices hit the shelves, people found them very slow to boot in compared to even the (compared to PPC2k/ PPC2k2 devices, which booted in after a reset almost instantenously) already "slow" WM2003/WM2003SE devices.

Fortunately, the situation has, in cases, dramatically changed with the later released ROM upgrades, which is best seen on the example of the HTC Wizard. All the measurements have been made on freshly hard reset devices without installing anything and just measuring the time it takes from resetting the device to opening the Start menu.

I’ve constantly been receiving requests (see for example this thread) to publish more and more power consumption measurements of current Pocket PC devices. Here you are :)

First, please read at least this article (if you haven’t already done so) to understand what this article is all about. I also highly recommend the other articles I’ve linked in from the Recommended links section.

It was a few days ago that I’ve published some test results of the HTC Wizard (a.k.a. i-mate K-Jam, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Qtek 9100, MDA Vario, XDA mini S, SPV M3000, VPA Compact II, Dopod 838), Bluetooth and infrared power consumption-wise. Now, the HTC Universal follows suit.

Bluetooth

First and foremost, the case of the Universal seems to be very similar to that of the Wizard: that is, it’s almost impossible to measure the additional power consumption of the Bluetooth module. The difference between the switched on and the switched off case was 1% (at most!) a day (if at all).

This, incidentally, corresponds to my measurements of the BT unit with the PDA switched on. According to my measurements, the BT unit burns between 1 and 2 mA’s in those cases. This, as the device has a 1620 mAh battery, corresponds to between 800 and 1600 hours battery life alone - that is, not taking into account the need to power the dynamic RAM, which is pretty much the same as with the HTC Wizard, which is around 1.25 mWh corresponding to about 2% battery level drop/day (don’t forget that the Wizard has a smaller, 1250 mAh battery; this is why it had a bigger, 2.5% battery charge level drop figure).

If you haven’t heard of this really great application yet, make sure you download it from here (alternate download here), unzip it and read the readme.pdf inside. It’ll explain what to do.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=43992

http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=43992

As with the pevious, i-mate K-jam (HTC Wizard) upgrade, i-mate has posted the upgrade far earlier to their public, freely accessible FTP site than officially announcing it.

The great folks over at XDA-Developers are constantly monitoring the FTP site for upgrades and have also noticed the new ROM installer.

While the ROM has AKU2, but, as with the k-Jam update, it seems (it's not confirmed yet as the information is pretty

http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?p=195706