Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today's thing is the Hewlett-Packard
iPAQ RX1950 PDA, released in September of 2005 for an asking price of $299.
More specifically though this is a brand new in box, still sealed example of the rather
special model known as the RX1955! Well okay, calling it "special" is a bit of an
exaggeration here. What I mean is that it holds special meaning to *ME* being that
it was my first PDA, or personal digital assistant. The only real difference
between the RX1950 and 1955 is that the former was sold on a corporate market
and the latter was sold at retail. And speaking of retail, PDAs were at the
height of their popularity in the mid 2000s and I'd had my mind set on getting
one for years by 2005. This one stood out to me for several reasons back then but
let's get to some context first. I was 19 years old in 2005, just starting
college, and found myself working odd jobs all over town. The main things I
wanted to do were take notes, listen to MP3s, browse the web through Wi-Fi, and of
course I wanted to play some games while not smiling. Nowadays it's easy enough to
just grab a tablet or a smartphone and be done with it but back then, nah man.
Tablets were way too expensive and cumbersome and my cell phone was one of
these beauties: an LG VX6100. Not exactly a productivity powerhouse with its
resolution of 96 x 64. But hey it had a VGA camera, that was neat! So with my
needs in mind and the technology available, my two real options in 2005 were
a laptop or a PDA. And while a laptop fit most of my needs I didn't really have
the money to get the ones I wanted and the idea of hauling something that large
to class in my already stuffed backpack was not appealing. So that led me to the
iPAQ RX1955, which at the time was one of HP's entry-level PDAs. They had a
whole range of iPAQ devices back then and to be honest, I found most of them
pretty ugly. But not the RX1955. Right on the front of the box you can see why I
chose this model: not only did it look sleek and stylish but it had
built-in Wi-Fi, ran Windows Mobile 5, and featured SDIO card expandability.
These were three things I had almost no experience with at that point and I was
highly intrigued by the possibilities of being able to put my files and MP3s on
an SD card and mess around with all that kind of stuff. But also with Windows
Mobile and the whole Pocket PC ecosystem, and using Windows with a touchscreen was
super appealing to me at the time. And hey check out that Samsung logo on the
box, what's that about? Well the RX1950 series made use of a
300 megahertz Samsung SC32442, which was a 32-bit multi stacked package,
based on the ARM920T core, that integrated a wide array of CPU, memory,
and I/O functions into a single chip 14 millimeters across. The result was that
it may not have been the fastest chip of its day but it was relatively cheap and
drew little power. Enough technical details for the moment, it's time to
break that seal after it's languished in some overstocked warehouse for 13 years!
[satisfying yet soft box-cutting noises]
Oh yeah, this is exciting! I sold off my original rRX1955 forever ago so I
haven't seen this stuff in ages! Atop the first layer of packaging is the
documentation, shrink-wrapped for your protection, as well as this informative
quick start guide on the underside of the box lid, and an equally informative
but less necessary section on the front advertising several of the optional
accessories you could buy from HP. And on the second layer down you get a neat
little tray holding the iPAQ itself and, man. Just holding this again
immediately brings back memories. Although it seems a bit smaller than I remember
somehow, but actually that's probably just because I'm used to using
gargantuan 7-inch smartphones these days. Next you get the USB sync and charging
cable, the power adapter, the battery, and a simple fabric carrying case. Let's go
ahead and open up that documentation bundle before going further though,
starting with the manual that looks more substantial than it really is. There are
only about 45 pages of it per language and most of what it contains can be
learned just by using the device and its built-in tutorials. You also receive a
"Getting Started CD," which contains the software to sync it with a Windows PC
and all that kind of stuff. You also get another ad for more HP products and
accessories, including some lovely-looking leather cases that I still kind of want.
As well as some information on warranties and end-user license
agreements that I, of course, absolutely read cover to cover. And hey look, another
ad, this one for audible.com. Nyeh-heh, yeah not sponsored. Man they just have not let
off the gas have they? And yes that free month still applies
but only because they've never stopped giving away free months to anything that
moves. And hey look, yet another ad, this time for Smartphone and Pocket PC
Magazine. Yeah they must have just rebranded it when they printed this,
I remember when it was just called Pocket PC Magazine for a while. Well enough of that,
time for some plastic peeling perfection!
[crinkly, sticky, plastic-removal sounds]
Ah that feels right. And because I can't wait to play with this again let's just
plug in the battery and see if it works.
[battery insertion noises commence, suspense rising in anticipation of its first power-on]
It does! Although it'll certainly need some charging still, though the battery
held enough juice all this time to get through the initial setup. Stuff like
calibrating the touch screen and setting the time of day. Sweet. So to get this
thing charged up using the wall adapter we'll need both that and the Active Sync
cable because there's nowhere to plug this in directly from the wall to the
iPAQ. That goes in the bottom there and then this whole thing plugs into the
PDA. You *can* also charge it directly through USB with a newer third-party
cable, but from the factory you did need both cables combined to get power.
This was pretty normal for PDAs like this. On the top from left to right you get a
three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack, a spot to plug in SD or MMC cards,
and a spot to store your stylus, which is pretty necessary. This doesn't have a
capacitive touchscreen, you will be pressing down to get things to work.
And I always kind of liked how it has this fake SD card, I guess to keep the slot
from getting dirt and crap in there. And instead of putting a little protector on
top they were just like, "here's a blank piece of plastic to put in there."
So turning it on is as simple as pressing the 'on' button. And you get these two LEDs up at
the top: the left one is the Wi-Fi indicator and the right one shows if
it's charging or needs charging. And on the bottom you get some physical buttons.
Mostly they're for shortcuts to applications, but by
default holding down this one actually changes the screen orientation from
portrait to landscape mode, a handy little thing indeed since this doesn't
have any accelerometers or anything to do that automatically. Along the right
hand side here you'll see this little silver switch which is for opening the
battery bay. That's really all that does. On the left-hand side you'll see this
little cassette tape symbol beside this button here, and pressing that
immediately opens up the voice recording mode. And yes this does have a microphone built-in.
[low quality recoding plays back] "This is a direct recording from the iPAQ. Not the greatest microphone
I've ever heard, but not the worst either." Along the bottom is where you plug in
your Active Sync cable and you also get this little port here for IrDA. This is
the infrared interface so if you had any software that, say, acted as a virtual
remote control you can actually control your TV, your A/V receiver, anything with
infrared that can be programmed. And you could use your PDA as a smart remote
which was pretty awesome in 2005. Okay so let's dive into the interface, and really
the Windows Mobile Pocket PC experience for a bit, because this is not only
something that intrigued me a whole lot nearly 2000s but it really kind of still
does. I enjoy seeing Windows crammed into a smaller environment like this and
comparing it to the desktop experience. I mean, you still get a Start Menu, you
still have a control panel full of all the settings that you would expect.
In fact, some things that you might *not* expect,
depending on your expectations. Like the ability to remap every single one of the
buttons on this thing, except for the power button of course. So if you want to
swap anything to pretty much anything else, yeah, you can do that. You can make a
dedicated Solitaire button if you want to, doesn't matter, it lets you do it. This is
also where you can apply all sorts of battery-saving options, brightness
settings, things like that. Although due to the hardware that this uses, like I
mentioned earlier, the battery life is really good. At least on a fresh battery
back in the day, you could get over 9 even up to 10 hours of battery life
depending on what you're doing. In my experience, this older battery, it only
holds about three or four hours but still not terrible considering this is a
1,100 mAH battery from 2005. Something that is not so cool though
about the RX1955 is the memory situation.
It came with a 64 megabyte ROM as well as 32 megs of SDRAM. But yeah it
doesn't leave you with a whole lot, so having a half-decent SD card in there is
absolutely a requirement as far as I'm concerned. And again if you're familiar
with the Windows environment and navigating all that kind of stuff then
the File Explorer acts very much like Windows Explorer. And you have plenty of
familiar folders like My Documents, Program Files, Temp, and Windows. And any
SD or MMC cards that you insert will show up as a folder in here. As for
all the applications that came on the 1955 it's pretty much your generic PDA
type stuff. You get a calendar for doing calendar-scheduling things, you get a
contacts list for adding contacts to your list, mostly for email because this
is not a smartphone -- you can't call anyone or text anyone. But if you wanted
to communicate in some way, either directly to another iPAQ or over the
Internet, you can do that. You also get a calculator for doing very specific
calculations, and then you have Pocket MSN. And I actually did use this back in
the day for a little bit because I had Hotmail at one point. You also get a
Notes app where you can handwrite in your own notes here. And yes it does have
handwriting recognition which actually it was pretty accurate, I was always
impressed with how well that it handled my sloppy handwriting. This version of
Windows Mobile 5 also came with some pretty basic Microsoft Office suite
programs, such as PowerPoint Mobile which doesn't actually let you create
powerpoints, but if you had any that you put on your SD card then you could view
them. And you also got Word Mobile, which is an incredibly simple word processor.
And that was fine although typing on this little tiny screen is
just not something you wanted to do, especially in my case. I was at school,
I wanted to use this thing for taking notes in class, and I did. But usually I
would just write it in the Notes app. Or what I did is actually got one of those
fold-out keyboards. I don't have that anymore but it would plug in the Active
Sync thing and kind of created a little cradle situation. But yeah, don't expect
a whole lot in terms of customization or formatting of your documents, you get a
grand total of two fonts: Tahoma or Courier New. That's it, no Word Art
here. But hey, no Clippy either so you take your wins where you can get them.
Even more limited though is Excel Mobile. I can't imagine
anyone ever did any kind of serious work with spreadsheets on this little screen.
I would hate to actually make a substantial spreadsheet on this. It's
okay for doing edits to existing ones I suppose. Now let's get to some of the
more enjoyable, fun applications like Windows Media Player, which of course
lets you play media like MP3s and WMA files.
[LGR's 'Watto Cantina Hum' remix plays over tinny PDA speakers]
That was a huge reason that I
wanted a PDA, I never had an iPod. I've still never had an iPod. So I was always
interested in devices like this that let me do all sorts of things in addition to
playing MP3s. And you could also view and do some very basic image manipulation
with photographs, stuff like rotating and cropping and that's about it. And yes
there actually was a camera add-on for this device, which I never had. I would
still like to get one just to try it out. But yeah it was pretty neat to be able
to take photos around with you like this, especially with digital cameras back
then. I mean my HP digital camera had a one-inch display in 2005, so this one
being almost four inches was pretty awesome. It also made it pretty great for
watching back video files in the Windows Media Video format.
[LGR video about the Tapwave Zodiac plays, still over those tinny PDA speakers]
The speaker is not particularly great but it was pretty cool with headphones. And you know, it's a
320x240 resolution screen, that's not a massive amount or anything but it
doesn't really need it. This is a three point seven inch diagonal screen and
it's in 16-bit color. The pixel density is really not that bad,
I definitely watched a few episodes of Prison Break on this back in the day.
And then finally there's the wireless capability of this thing, which comes in
the form of built-in Wi-Fi. And no, this does not have Bluetooth, which a lot of
reviewers dinged this device for back in the day but I didn't really care about
Bluetooth. Wi-Fi it was all I cared about and this iPAQ came with 802.11b support
built-in. Still totally usable depending on the network you're trying to connect
to, but I've found that there are quite a few places and devices that no longer
broadcast an 802.11b signal and stick to G or N. But an even bigger issue
can be the wireless encryption and more often than not this is a real
roadblock seeing as this device predates WPA2 being mandatory. It doesn't seem to
support it at all so you have to find something with WPA, WEP, or just no
encryption at all. And you can probably get around that issue at home with your
own router but connecting to public Wi-Fi in coffee shops or random
businesses is a real toss-up. Most spots I tried don't have the right signal,
don't use a supported encryption method, or they require a login webpage that the
iPAQ didn't know what to do with, treating what should be clickable
buttons as text. Or not loading at all, sometimes even crashing the program.
Heck it'll do that when you're just trying to load any number of modern websites.
The browser in general is just too outdated to be very usable, it won't even load
Google or anything with HTTPS. And really, this browser sucked in 2005 as well,
which is why I ended up installing Opera for Pocket PCs even back then. Well that's
enough of that, let's move on to the gaming side of things. Starting with the
two rather lackluster games that it comes pre-installed with, the first one being
Microsoft Solitaire. Which is just Solitaire. And Bubble Breaker, which is
one of these things where you just kind of try to pop as many objects together
as you can. As long as there are two are more connected then you can pop them.
And that's it, incredibly basic games that does not do this device justice
whatsoever. Because really the RX1955, and all sorts of Pocket PCs from the mid
2000s, are quite capable gaming machines. And of course getting games on there
often meant that you had to plug it into a PC and get it going that way. This is
the CD that it came with installing under Windows XP and once that gets
going, Active Sync will do its thing and sync any of your information on your PC
that you tell it to. Or you can use it as an interface between your iPAQ and any
downloaded programs that you want to install onto the machine. Or if you
don't want to do it that way or if your program, say, came in a CAB file -- which a
lot of homebrew and more illegitimate packages do -- then you can just open up
the Pocket PC right in Windows Explorer and then just copy and paste the CAB
files and then open them directly from the iPAQ. And there you go, it's not
gonna ask for much of any verification. It might say, "oh unknown publisher," but
there's nothing stopping you from installing pretty much anything you want
on this thing. So yeah let's just check out a few of the games that I bought or
demoed back in the day starting with the official port of SimCity 2000.
[SimCity 2000 theme music plays all happily]
I actually bought this physically, I believe it was a Best Buy or something. They had a whole
section of Pocket PC games and software that you could buy boxed for a few years.
And yeah, this one in particular SimCity 2000 is pretty good. That pixel art looks
fantastic on this little tiny screen and you know what? It plays pretty well.
Probably runs it better than my 66 megahertz 486 did back in the day really.
I was also really fond of a lot of the Astraware games, in particular the ones
from PopCap. You know before they became microtransaction-laden, free-to-play garbage.
Games like Bejeweled 2 were pretty great because it was really just
the same game as you would get on a desktop PC but in a handheld format.
And that was so cool, at least for the time. And I really liked playing it with the
stylus. In fact, pretty much any game that was meant to be played with a mouse
pointer is great with a stylus -- if not better sometimes -- because you get really
direct control such as with PopCap's and Astraware's version of Zuma. In fact
the control is so precise that it almost makes the gameplay trivial. You just
point and tap to wherever you want your balls to go. So yeah I ended up spending
a lot of time downloading and trying out all of the Astraware games. And then
there were independent, freely-released homebrew games like Wolfenstein 3D here.
This one just comes with the shareware version but you can install the full one
as well if you had the files to go with it. And yeah it's a pretty darned
accurate port of Wolfenstein, it's really only held back by the
control scheme here. And that only makes sense, that little directional pad on the
bottom of the unit is just not made for moving around in games. For one thing it
has a button in the middle of it so if you try to rock it around with your
finger you end up pressing the button, which activates something else -- it just
doesn't feel good at all anyway. And since you don't have any buttons on the
other side of the unit, either on the top or the right in this case, you have to
tap on the screen to do things like fire and open doors. And it's kind of novel
and it friggin works, but that's about it. You'd really want to plug in a keyboard
if you were gonna play these games for any length of time. And the same goes for
emulators, of which, yes there were a ton for Windows Mobile and Pocket PCs.
And they were pretty capable due to the hardware, this one right here is Pocket
Nester, which allows you to play NES and Famicom games. And you know what, it does
a pretty good job. Again the problem is the control scheme. These buttons are
just not made for gaming. Again it's not like a modern phone, it's not a
capacitive touchscreen, you don't get multi-touch at all. So it just doesn't
make sense for any kind of virtual key or controller layout. But yeah that's
pretty much it for the iPAQ RX1955! A machine that I am very fond of at this
point but you know what? Back in 2006 -- or really I guess 2007 -- well
let's just say the honeymoon period didn't last very long. I think I had this
thing for about six, seven months and then I was like "nah man." I sold it off
and bought myself a Blackberry Pearl [chuckles!] Because honestly the screen was just too
small to do any kind of serious work in class or anywhere for that matter.
I ended up just taking notes on paper and then using a Blackberry for things like
MP3s and keeping a calendar and contacts list and doing Wi-Fi all that.
And besides it had a data plan and I could just use mobile internet through, I guess
it was Suncom at that point and then they moved onto T-Mobile. But anyway the
BlackBerry did really most of what I wanted on the iPAQ, other than the
games. And for the games I ended up buying myself a PSP-2000.
[sounds of bowling pins falling over]
And that just satisfied me for a long time, as far as doing portable gaming with physical
controls and a lot of support for homebrew software. Like, it's so easy to
softmod one of those things and yeah. With a Blackberry and a PSP that just
didn't make sense to hold on to the iPAQ for very long. But it is still
something that I absolutely have had a blast going back to mess with now, which
brought a very healthy dose of happy nostalgia in equal parts with a healthy dose
of reality and why I got rid of it in the first place. Still though, it's kind
of reignited my passion for Pocket PCs and now I'm looking at some of the others
back then that would have been even better options. And I'm sure I'll be
revisiting these kind of mid-2000s mobile devices in the future so if you
enjoyed this video I definitely recommend sticking around. I have
another couple in the works already, one is from palm and one is from Sweden
let's put it that way. But anyway enough of this ramble for this video, and I
thank you very much for watching!