Rating: 
Summary: HP Ipaq 4355, the perfect road companion.
Review: The HP Ipaq 4355 is a great road companion. Not only is it easy to use, thanks to Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, but also very powerful, thanks to Hewlett Packard. With this PocketPC, you are always in touch. After being accustomed to lugging around my laptop between work, school and home, I replaced them all with this PDA. It is powerful enough to do basic applications, such as powerpoint presentations, word documents and excel spreadsheets, but besides this, you are always in touch and can check email and browse the net thanks to 802.11b WiFi and bluetooth built into this pda. The mini keyboard makes it easy to type and send messages. The battery life is also fantastic, and along with a second removeable battery, you do not have to worry about running out, and even if you do, there is a backup battery that will save your information. All In all, after using this Pda for a few months, there is no way anyone can take this away, because my back is happy because I no longer have to carry a heavy laptop with me wherever I go!
Rating: 
Summary: Good but not a compelling buy
Review: The iPaq 4355 stands out from the other Pocket PCs in that it has a built-in thumb keyboard. Overall it's a solid PDA, with the usual advantages and annoying quirks of the Pocket PC platform. If you a power user you will appreciate the keyboard and the inclusion of both wi-fi (802.11b only, though) and Bluetooth. Of course, the price is not for most PDA buyers.Here's a quick rundown on the more prominent features and a real-world user's perspective: + Built-in thumb keyboard. I do a lot of "typing" on my PDAs because I use them to keep a journal, and I'm crazy about entering all sorts of appointments and reminders. While the Palm platform has long had devices with built-in keyboards (Tungsten C and W and a number of Clie models), I think the 4355 is the first to sport one among Pocket PCs. The keyboard is quite usable, although obviously you can't touch-type unless you have very tiny fingers.
- No dedicated numeric keys! This turns out to be quite annoying. Each time you want to type a number you have to hold down a function key. I'm used to the generosity of the Danger/T-Mobile Sidekick keyboard so I find the lack of dedicated numeric keys perplexing and frustrating. + Both wi-fi and Bluetooth built-in. Obviously this pleases those of us who are wireless freaks. The wi-fi setup is also quite easy, at least for us geeks.
- Wi-fi is only 802.11b and range is not very good. I lose connection after about 20 feet! Also I haven't been able to get BT to work with my USB BT adapter. Really can't figure out why. I personally have no faith in Bluetooth. + Bright color screen. Like with previous iPaq's this has a very good screen with nice color balance and strong backlighting.
- Screen is small at only 3.5" diagonal. Also Pocket PC limits resolution to QVGA, or 240x320. + Big battery included and provides decent battery life, provided you don't use wireless! If I turn on wi-fi full-time I find that the battery will run out in about 2 hours of constant use, even though I wasn't playing MP3. So if you play MP3 and use wireless at the same time, expect very short battery life.
- Entire unit is bulky and kinda heavy. A big minus continues to be Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7. Anyone thinking of switching to Pocket PC should be aware of this problem. ActiveSync really sucks. It's very hard to get it work, and it doesn't work much of the time. And if your iPaq does a hard reset (mine did on its own), when you re-sync, you get double entries in your desktop Outlook (at least I did). It took me forever to remove the duplicate entries. If someone knows of an easier way to fix this, please post the solution here. In short, this is a decent Pocket PC geared toward the power user. If it had a large VGA screen like the Toshiba e855, I would have given it four stars.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT!!!! AND You Can Buy It Cheaper Elsewhere!
Review: There are many Places selling this item cheaper. Check pricegrabber.com and dealtime.com and yahoo.com
Enjoy it does everything!!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Works well and does all it says.....
Review: This is a great little machine. Having used Palm since my IIIx I was hesitant to switch but glad I did. The wireless connection works perfectly and effortlessly and from great distances. I have a MS 700 router and it reaches every room in our house (attic, 2nd floor, 1st floor and basement it also reaches my pool are which is the farthest from the router and works perfectly). I thought I was going to have a problem with our older house and thick plaster walls but there was no issues. To connect to the WLAN basically, you turn the icon for WLAN on and the PPC does the rest. If you need a WEP key it will prompt you for it (I still don't get the one reviewer who was knocking it for not having wireless G ...nowhere did it say it was included so why complain about something that you weren't being sold??).
I bought the Belkin GPS through belkin for $149 and it works awesome through blue tooth on this PPC. It has everything I need and I travel the US extensively. You will need a large SD card though 256 or 512 to make the GPS worthwhile but you can find them on fatwallet.com for a reasonable price.
As stated I travel a lot and my company will not allow modifications to the standard laptop package so this enabled me to do a lot of personal stuff while on the road. Throough my BT phone I can surf if away from a WLAN or get emails.
I do agree that the PPC should come with a hard case for the $ spent but I only spent $269 so why complain. That was a bargain from my point.
The only other machine I considered was the Dell Axim x30 but after being told by a Dell rep that they were having "engineering" issues I went with this and could not be happier.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Cool
Review: This is a pretty cool PDA. I got it for my third year of medical school and I haven't been disappointed. It's lightning fast, and the OS seems pretty stable. The only thing I'd do differently is not place as much importance on having a physical keyboard. I initially thought that the keyboard would be a great plus, but I rarely use it. For the times I do use it (typing passwords on web forms when I don't trust my scribbling), I could easily use the pop-up screen keyboard. Another issue, which has been raised here before, is its wireless capabilities. The thing only supports the older WEP authentication, and not the newer WPA (which is more secure). I had set up my home network with WPA, but I had to downgrade it to WEP to use the iPAQ. This is annoying, not to mention puzzling. I mean, it's 2004 and they still haven't implemented 802.11g? I guess this is partly the fault of the OS, which superficially resembles Windows XP. A problem I've had with the OS is that when you hit the 'x' in the upper right of the window (x=close, one would think), it only minimizes the program (it seems to stay on in memory and you have to shut it down in memory). This is retarded. A minus sign would be a more accurate representation. A word about HP support. Their online knowledgebase is almost useless (I was searching to see if the iPAQ had 802.11g support), and no matter what you do, don't use their online chat support. The chat tech support guy I had was completely clueless, took 5 minutes to answer each message I sent, and didn't even bother acknowledging his ignorance. He just sent me a word document and told me to read it. The only thing he was good for was giving me the HP supprt phone number (which was wrong, but they automatically transferred me). Get their phone number (it's supposedly hidden deep somewhere) and call them. The phone tech support guy I talked to (after a long wait) was professional, helpful, polite, and knowledgeable. Finally, if anyone else is using this for medical school, note that your friends will probably have Palms. They'll be beaming their cool programs to each other (for free), while you stand idly by with your incompatible iPAQ. On the other hand, our school has moved their records electronic, and they've chosen iPAQs. Take a look at what your colleagues and schools are using before you spend the big bucks.
Rating:
Summary: Drawbacks
Review: This model has a number of problems.
- Size: This unit isn't very portable -- it's pretty big, in fact. The keyboard makes data entry easier, but I'd rather have something smaller.
- Screen: Mine cracked, and to this day, I don't know why -- maybe heat? Some message boards suggested that sometimes these screens just break. They promptly replaced it for $175.
- Case: The included case is a cheap, nylon slipcover. My unit was in that very case when it cracked. If you want a case that fits it while it's on the cradle, there's only one I've found (by Bellagio). If you want something sturdy, there's an aluminum one by InnoPocket (but it won't fit on the cradle with that case on).
- WiFi: I thought this would be cool, but I have yet to find it useful (and I have a WiFi home network). Surfing the web on a pda is not fun.
- HP camera: You can buy a cam to go on top. Don't. It's bulky, and keeps the ipaq from fitting in a case, and has a dark (if high res) picture.
The best pda I've seen to date is a Sony Clie NX70V, which (sadly) they don't make any more :-(
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Customer Service
Review: We had the product and really loved it for 30 days...then for no reason, (we didn't drop it or bang it) the screen got a crack in it...Since we were still under warranty called HP...sorry the screen isn't covered. They wanted 175 dollars to fix it...it then took them over a month to send the box that we were to ship it in...then because it took so long...Oooops the price for the repair went up to $199. We will never buy another HP product again...
Rating:
Summary: My 4355
Review: Well, I'm a Mac user and a long time fan of palm devices but I just couldn't resist this Pocket PC. Other than it syncs better to my outlook than palm devices, I like how it has wifi, bluetooth, a built in keyboard, blah blah blah. So, this has been perfect so far. I bought it to do some wardriving, er warwalking, and some wifi auditing and it works great. But, no wireless sniffers yet work with it (ministumbler) so I'll have to be patient. Yeah, it's bulky, but better than lugging around a laptop.
Rating:
Summary: Overhyped. Underperformed.
Review: When I bought this gadget, I thought that it would do everything as advertised and more since it was on the top of the list of many PDA review sites. Unfortunately, buying this thing is like buying a car without seats or radio/stereo system, it looks good but you're going to have to spend hundreds of dollars more to get it to perform the way it is shown to perform in reviews. It's a bare bones system. If you do not need wi-fi, then you should go for one of the $150 models since they do about the same thing as this thing. No software, very little storage memory. Out of the box, the thing does as much as a $0.70 paper notepad does and less. Everything costs more, even for this premium product. Not worth the hassle.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent PDA
Review: You wont get much better for software and wireless options, expandable memory w/ SAN Flash Slot, good res on the screen and of course the easy to use keyboard aswell.
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