HP iPaq 2215 PDA Review

By Jim on September 6th, 2003

I have to confess something – I’m an iPAQ addict. I’m on my third one and it’s still my favorite line of PDAs. My last iPAQ, the 3835, started showing its age when the speaker jack stopped working. Time to buy a new PDA. Well, okay – maybe a dead speaker jack wasn’t the best reason to buy a new PDA but it worked for me.

I should note here that I considered buying a Palm. But that platform has lagged woefully behind the Pocket PC platform in some respects. Someday, if and when Palm finally catches up, I will take another look at the platform. If there’s a good Palm based PDA then, I might buy one. But not now. I also considered buying a Linux based PDA but the current models simply don’t cut it for a number of reasons. However, I have my eye on Sharp’s Linux PDAs and I may snag one if things progress far enough.

I started searching for a new PDA by stopping by Circuit City. There it was, prominently displayed on the top shelf. A new HP iPAQ 2215. After a few minutes of waffling, I plunged right in and bought it Yup, you read that right. I bought this sucker with cold, hard cash and then decided to do review it. Go figure.

There’s a lot inside the iPaq to like. Here’s a link to HP’s site for all the details, but I was particularly taken by the 400MHz Intel XScale processor and integrated bluetooth. More on that later.

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