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