I've had my iPaq 4155 (with WiFi and Blueetooth) for about a month now and after 3 Palm devices, I am officially leaving the Palm world for the Pocket PC. It feels strange loving something that runs a Microsoft operating system, but the Pocket PC far exceeds my expectations, functioning much like a replacement for many of my laptop needs. Possibly the reason this OS is likable is because it is so much unlike many other MS packages I use. It seems, on the surface, to be as simple as it can be while providing some of the functionality you expect from a desktop computer.

With the software that came with the device, I can do very bare bones Word and Excel, I can do IMAP email with my mailblocks.com account, and I can browse the web. With some added software -- some real cheap and some free -- and an SD storage card, I now also do telnet, listen to MP3s and watch MPEGs, and sketch or take notes that get OCRed into plain text. And I can run all those apps concurrently -- as far as I know, Palm still can't do that. The coolest thing, though is ripping and compressing a DVD that I can watch on my iPaq. I ripped my Scratch DVD last week, which was about 128 MB compressed and put in on my 256MB SD card. Now that's cool. And I got the thing synching with my Mac using PocketMac. Sweetness.

A few things irk me. MS needs to improve it's Pocket IE so you can view pages in landscape mode. They also need to a better way to easily switch between open apps and to close running applications. I got a little freeware app called Wisbar to do this, but seems like a necessary utility to integrate with the OS. Overall, I'm very pleasantly surprised.