After a long time, at last my dream came true…

I always wanted to own a PDA but the cost of one kept me away from buying it. But after some time, I was able to get some fund and buy this beauty: O2 Atom XDA.

I always go for the BEST when it comes to gadgets. That’s why my friends call me the Gadgets Freak! (And that’s how the name for this Blog came up). So, I’ve decided to buy the costliest one with many features and looks. The ultimate choice is of course an O2 PDA.

O2 is always been an excellent provider in PDA’s and Pocket PC’s. So, I’ve went on buying one. The one that seemed perfect for me is an O2 Atom XDA Pocket PC. So, I’ve bought it.

Now, one thing is very clear about O2. They do really superb graphics. The Screen Quality of O2 Atom XDA is excellent. The screen is also bigger and crispy. I particularly liked O2’s Logo and the Today Background screen they’ve provided. I even switched the PDA many times on and off just to enjoy the O2 Logo which is displayed when the PDA is switched on. Carrying an O2 Atom XDA easily earned me the high respect in my Friends and Colleagues circle. They all admired it. So, as for looks, this PDA is the BEST for sure.

The OS is Windows Mobile 5.0 (Windows Mobile 6.0 has been released, but there are very few models available with WM6 preloaded). The OS does Microsoft’s ultimate goal easily… The User Friendliness. It’s so easy to use that even my friend’s son of 6 years old can play well with it. The Interface is also much faster. As usual with every PDA, this one accepts everything through Touch Screen interface with the Stylus for pointing. I hated having to grab the Stylus everytime so, tried to go by fingers. I MUST say, this PDA really does it for the people just like me. It has big screen pointers and icons which are easy to click with your fingers. And the O2’s exclusive Phone Interface is the ultimate example for it. It provides an virtual telephone keyboard with bigger buttons on which you can play around with just your fingers for making any type of calls.

The Pocket PC comes with all options that are usual in high range PDA’s. Connnection options: InfraRed, Bluetooth, WLAN, WiFi and GPRS. I particularly liked the WLAN very much as it helped me to browse in O2 XDA as well as in my Laptop at the same time using Wireless Broad Band connection which I’ve in my home. Surprisingly for a PDA Mobile, this one comes with 2 Mega Pixel Camera with LED Flash. Hey, that’s one of the cool features you can only find in Mobiles. Needless to say, the Camera Quality is also excellent. It does allows night time photo shoot also with a special preset mode.

Being an Windows Mobile PDA which supports miniSD for external storage (As usual I went for a 2GB miniSD that really rocked!) the installable applications and documents possibilities are huge. I particularly liked the original Windows Pocket Office that comes pre-installed in this PDA. That supported almost all of the Desktop version features. Having this PDA replaced my laptop almost up to a certain extend. The internal Outlook is excellent for frequent Email receivers. I’ve also uploaded some of my PDF books and downloaded and installed Adobe PDF Reader for Pocket PC and voila, I’m having the ultimate eBook reader in hand! It even supports UTF-8 which means, I’m able to see my Tamil eBooks like Ponniyin Selvan, Sivagamiyin Sabatham etc without a worry. The Adobe PDF Reader also supports the Reflow mode under which the PDF (with Text) is automatically wrapped according to the PDA’s screen making it very easy to navigate and read.

It supports Desktop Fonts also. I’ve tried installing some of my favourite fonts and had an enjoyable moments of typing Email in those fonts. Needless to say, I’ve installed few useful softwares also and made this PDA the ultimate tool of my Business and Personal needs. Being a Windows Mobile PDA really helps the PDA lovers very much as it’s applications and usability is unlimited.

I think that’s enough for the positive pointers about this PDA. But I’m sad to say it had few negative pointers also. I don’t know why anybody is NOT able to come up with a Gadget that never had any negative pointers. Particularly I hated it very much to see some of the important things that needed in a PDA or Pocket PC were negative in this PDA!

Main thing is the Battery Backup. Come on O2, you gave me an excellent PDA with utmost features in the world to play around but I won’t have the enough battery power to keep it on? That sounds to me like keeping all delicious food in front of me when I’m particularly hungry and then asking me not to eat them! They surely need to work on the Battery Backup. It didn’t even lasted for one full day for me.

I don’t know why these Microsoft guys also do the same. They always give us the BEST Operating System in it’s class with superb User friendly interface and everything along with very buggy and frequently hanging problems! I thought they only had it in the Desktop Operating Systems. But I’m wrong, they had it in this Mobile Operating System too! It’s frequently hanging and I kept resetting it (that ultimately killed my very much liking to the O2 Logo which I hated to see so many times as I’ve to reset the PDA). One thing that killed me is whenever I close a Program, it doesn’t actually closes it. It just keeps it in the Memory and clears only from the screen. This ultimately reduced my battery power, memory limits and also the speed of the interface. Luckily O2 gave the Today Screen button in O2 Plus (which is free, but you need to install separately) which when clicked will show all running programs and you can end them in there (just like a Task Manager). Now, I know why these Microsoft guys ever came up with a Task Manager in a PDA!

One additional thing missing (optional thing of course) is the Keyboard. I’ve provided with virtual keyboard (which I can only use with Stylus. Fingers can’t work with that much small keyboard) and handwriting recognition and everything. Still, I think it will be good if O2 had a keyboard that I can physically handle. Here, I must mention that the hand writing recognition technology is really working great in this PDA which almost satisfied me and kept me away from thinking that it didn’t had a physical keyboard!

So far so good. Considering the Pros and Cons of this PDA, I still suggest this is the BEST PDA you can buy. Not just because I bought it. It’s just because, I found out later that most of the Cons I’ve mentioned here are usual among all PDA’s. But the Pros on this PDA really makes it stand out in the crowd.