PCS Pocket PC Phone Toshiba 2032 (Sprint)

Rating:
Summary: Great concept, poor execution
Review: I've only had this Toshiba 2032SP from Sprint for a few days now, and I'm really regretting it already. It is a rather poor cell phone (speakerphone or wired mic/earbud ONLY - no option for holding the phone to one's ear), and a so-so PDA. The dim, powerhungry screen is shameful. The Toshiba 2032SP won't last more than about 36 hours on a full charge of this new battery. Horrible performance from a cell phone (and don't forget, this is a cell phone). The TFT screen is dim and fuzzy even at it's most intense brightness setting. At it's lowest, power-saver friendly setting it is so dim and illegible as to cause headaches. Despite the bulk, a full-featured PDA (iPAQ anyone?) and a well engineered cell phone (nearly any Motorola anyone?) are a far better option than this paperweight.

Rating:
Summary: Great concept, poor execution
Review: I've only had this Toshiba 2032SP from Sprint for a few days now, and I'm really regretting it already. It is a rather poor cell phone (speakerphone or wired mic/earbud ONLY - no option for holding the phone to one's ear), and a so-so PDA. The dim, powerhungry screen is shameful. The Toshiba 2032SP won't last more than about 36 hours on a full charge of this new battery. Horrible performance from a cell phone (and don't forget, this is a cell phone). The TFT screen is dim and fuzzy even at it's most intense brightness setting. At it's lowest, power-saver friendly setting it is so dim and illegible as to cause headaches. Despite the bulk, a full-featured PDA (iPAQ anyone?) and a well engineered cell phone (nearly any Motorola anyone?) are a far better option than this paperweight.

Rating:
Summary: Thera Pocket Pc
Review: This Pocket PC works for me..... when i bought it i was wondering if it was good only due to the fact of its low battery life. So far i am having no problems what so ever with the phone/pda/pocket pc. the only thing that could be better would be the battery life when you charge it but it still lasts long for me and it does do what i want it to do so i am happy i would recommend this product!!

Rating:
Summary: Trying to be fair
Review: Toshiba 2032 with Sprint PCS plan was my first PDA phone and it's been 6 months since I started using it. I bought this item because I thought I need a multiple-purpose pocket PC. I am mostly satisfied with this PPC and sometimes I realize other usabilities with the PPC but there are of course things I wish to have.

As an experienced user of PPC now, I am waiting for a PPC phone with at least 300Mhz speed, 128M memory, bluetooth, megapixel camera, and maybe finger-print recognition. With that kind of PPC phone in the market, I think it would be silly to carry phone, organizer, camera, iPod, and DVD player, seperately because you can do more with the single PPC. I also dare to predict that PPC or different form of the kind will replace our purse and its content (credit card, identification, and money) in our (near or far) future.

I gave 3 stars mainly because there are currently several better PPCs than 2032. So here I write pros and cons of the 2032 PPC to help your decision.

Pros.

1. With $78, you can buy 1GB SD card which can be inserted to the PPC. I mainly use the 1GB disk space to store word or pdf documents, photos, and music files (I currently saved 12 CDs and about 100 documents to the card).

2. Graphics and Interface with stylus are no doubt great. As a computer geek for last 20 years, I hate to sit in front of computer to orgainize my thought and study things in my free time. (Maybe it's time to retire) Pocket PC solved the problem. Watching TV or listening music, I can now use PPC to organize ideas or read books in my sofa or bed.

2. Since PPC can store pdf and word files, as I mentioned, PPC can be literally a eBook. Using ActiveSync, I can easily download books and documents from desktop, and read them anywhere anytime.

3. Wireless web browsing or emailing are great too. I can read news, AOL emails, or google anywhere with the PPC. If you want to frequently surf internet, don't forget to sign up Sprint vision service. In first month, I didn't do that and ended up with $300 bill. It turned out every web browsing costs $.50-$1.00 per minute without Vision serivice ($15/month). I requested discount and signed up the service. (Sprint kindly gave me the discount)

4. Playing music with Windows media is higher quality than I thought. It's not exactly iPod because of PPC's weight but I cannot say any difference in quality of music while it's portable enough.

5. Speaker phone is loud and clear. With simple holder, it can be used as a car phone . Although it;s not safe to dial numbers with PPC while driving, receiving a call is no problem.

6. As a developer, I can easily develop your own software with Microsoft .NET Visual Studio. Sometimes, it takes 30 minutes to make a simple software!!

Cons.

1. In my opionion, one of weakest point with this PPC is that you cannot use Bluetooth technology. Thus, you cannot have (cool) wireless headset nor wireless data communication with printers/computers. Especially, I think wireless headset is indispensible because it is not convenient to talk with wired headset. (I don't want to use speaker phone for all calls) Also I cannot use the PPC phone as a modem to my laptop. Some suggested you can buy Toshiba Bluetooth SDIO card to enable it. Don't even think about it. I was a fool to actually try it. Whenever PPC goes power-save mode, the Bluetooth SDIO card makes PPC dead. I have to hard-reboot and lose all your installed software. In addition, I couldn't make the bluetooth card wotk with the PPC.

2. I think PPC needs at least 64M memory to run various software without bumpiness. This PPC has 32M memory. Because of this, I have to kill some applications by hand in order to run a heavy-computation application. I thought about upgrading but I don't think there is a safe way to do that.

3. I thought I could use this PPC as portable movie player too. But playing video with Windows Media is not up to my expectation. There is no smoothness at all between actions. I think it's something to do with memory size or CPU speed. With analogy, I guess this PPC may not be good for full-graphic games. (I am not sure because I didn't try any game)

4. Battery life is too short. I can talk via phone only for 1 hour. And for some reason, there is no way of soft battery exchange. Only way to extend battery life is to buy a battery pack (4 AA batteries) and recharge PPC battery with the pack. (bulky!)

5. Quality of connection (wireless phone and internet) is not that good comparing cingular. (But we all hate crazy customer service gang at Cingular, don't we)

6. No thumb keyboard. I don't want to type with full keyboard looking at small screen of PPC. But it's not easy to type with touch-screen keyboard and stylus either. So attachable thumb keyboard would be useful.

7. No camera. I think adding camera to PPC makes it more complete portable PPC. I wouldn't mind quality of picture from PPC. But from time to time, you may want to keep something into picture.