Expandability

Compaq devised up a clever way of allowing the iPAQ to expand with their sleeve system, which basically allows them to sell sleeves which slide onto your iPAQ to give it new functionality, two of these such sleeves are available now.... in the US that is. The two are the Compact Flash sleeve and the PC Card sleeve, once you have these sleeves you'll be able to use whatever peripherals which you might have.

The downsides to this sleeve system are :-

• first, you have to GET a sleeve
• second, the sleeves cost a lot of money

Also, because the iPAQ does not have any built in media slots, you're stuck with 32MB RAM until you can get hold of a sleeve and some extra storage.

Currently CF cards are pretty easy to get around here, and the price have more or less come down, 32MB RAM will cost you about RM350 .

A CompactFlash card, usable in iPAQ once you get the expansion sleeve.

An MMC Card

The EM500 comes with a MMC (Multimedia Card) slot, the MMC format is relatively new when compared to the other formats (Compact Flash, SmartMedia) The upside to this format is that the MMC itself is very small, it's a postage stamp sized chip. But unfortunately MMCs can only be used for storage and nothing more (ie, network card, modem). Because of this, if you ever wanted to get a modem for the EM500 you'll have to get one made by Casio for the EM500 which snaps at the bottom of the unit.

MMC cards are hard to come by.... and because they are :-

• small
• new

So, even though the EM500 can be upgraded out of the box, the situation is not much different from iPAQ's sleeve system because you can't find either one here easily. Retailers here will charge you an arm and a leg, don't pay more than RM450 for 32MB RAM if you plan to buy one locally.

PC Connection

This cradle issue just makes me mad. Just look at the iPAQ cradle.

What's this? A serial cradle? When their box EXPLICITLY says USB Cradle included! Someone in Compaq decided that Malaysia should get the stock of serial cradles which they haven't been able to sell in the US market, I say drag the guy who made that decision out in the open and then throw all the serial cradles at him!

The reason I'm so mad about this is, SERIAL CONNECTIONS ARE SLOW! It takes very long to transfer 10MB worth of stuff from the PC to the PPC. And Compaq really shouldn't have done this! Maybe they think we at Malaysia aren't advanced enough to own USB hardware yet! :(

Now the folks at Casio are much better, yes they gave us an ugly bulky cradle instead of a plain USB sync cable (which I'd really much use). But they were able to reach a compromise with the cradle, just take a look at the rear of the cradle :-

Notice that there is both a serial port (left) and a USB jack (center small hole) in the cradle, the device itself ships with a USB cable but you can just buy a serial link (theoretically) to connect the cradle to your serial port.

The EM500's hybrid cradle might not be able to achieve full USB speeds, but it is MUCH better than a serial connection.

To give you an idea of how bad a serial connection is, check out the transfer speeds for a file about 2MB.

All in all bad Compaq! Good Casio!

NOTE : Dale Coffing of http://www.dalecoffing.com/ pointed out to me that the iPAQ with the serial cradle is wrong. So, to clear the confusion, the iPAQ with serial cradle is indeed correct as all iPAQs retailed in Malaysia come with a serial cradle.