Retrospective on the HP iPaq RX1955 PDA from 2005

Bro, I got the Palm OS software if you want it for your Palm vid. I actually still use a Palm PDA for certain things, I just prefer a pen based UI for certain apps

Sb129

Dude, you definitely need to get yourself a UMPC. The Samsung Q1 Ultra seems to be the most affordable. They even made a full on dock for the device!

Evangeline Domenech

I had an iPaq when it was still Compaq lol

Thomas Fuchs

Man this takes me back! I had a great Command and conquer game on my iPaq, nearly got in a lot of trouble playing that too much at work back in the day! Good times! :D

Mat Cooper

Always wanted to grab one of those, they looked awesome.

LGR

Something about this video takes me back to my days lusting after and eventually purchasing a Game Park GP2X. It was a Korean homebrew portable that ran Linux under the hood, sported a dual-core ARM processor with dedicated 2D video accelerator and had a very healthy emulator & homebrew scene back in the day (the popular PicoDrive Genesis emulator started life on this platform, to just name one). I hung on to my GP2X all the way up until my first smartphone, and regret selling the 2X to this day. The going prices on eBay are just ridiculous and this is now the only factor standing between me and another one.

Tktagmedia

I certainly do miss my Pearl in some ways. Crazy how intuitive that little ball was to navigate around quickly.

LGR

Yeah, I was surprised how similar Palm OS and WinMo were around the mid 2000s having tried devices from both branches at this point. Even the syncing process is almost identical, just one is HotSync and the other being ActiveSync.

LGR

This was awesome. I never had a PDA back in the day, but always thought they seeded really cool. I'm surprised how much this one was capable of!

Corey Ruth

I used a Sony PDA running PalmOS back when I had my math software programming job between 2002 and 2004. I went with Sony simply because at the time the price point was the best for the features included. I mostly used it to write down ideas for games or other things when I had them, or to pass time during the insanely long bus ride I had to and from work. Interestingly enough, despite being Sony instead of HP and using PalmOS instead of Windows Mobile, there are a LOT of similarities between what you just showed and mine. :o

Kris Asick

My First PDA was a Dell Axim, dell was really a price breaker back in those days. If I remember correctly the Axim was nearly half of the price of an iPaq (which was kind of the de factor standard in windows PDA's back then)

I totally had a Palm back in the day. It was pretty primitive compared to modern day smart phones, but I loved that thing. I mostly read fanfiction on it. Which was a lot of work considering that it didn't have wifi ability.

Ebay!

LGR

This was great, back in this time I had a Treo 700W and a Motorola Q at the time they were good. But were very slow, And multi tasking was poor. I moved to a Blackberry Pearl and then Blackberry Curve and was very happy until 2007 I think when I moved to an iPhone 3g ( missed the first model ) and havent looked back since.. Windows Mobile had huge potential so did Blackberry. My Pearl had a battery that would last days!

QUiKSR20

Not as cool as my Zire 71 was :P

JennaKay

Awesome video, Clint, and a neat little piece of tech. How did you find that one new-old stock? On a side-note, starting at the 2:57 mark and to 3:02 you repeat the work 'years' on the same sentence, I hate pointing it out, bu guess you might be bothered by it

LJFox

I adored my Palm Pilots when I was in middle school to high school. My dad worked in the tech field so he brought me back an old Palm III and I was literally over the moon. In high school, I got a Palm Zire 31 and it was perfect to listen to music, play solitaire (I wore a spot on the screen from tapping that over and over, whoops), and more importantly, I would copy fanfiction from the internet onto it, so I could read during class. I still have that Zire too, and it does indeed work!! :D

Carrie Marshall

Well, I'd messed with a couple smartphones by that point already so it wasn't totally alien. But yeah, I never imagined they'd be so ubiquitous and powerful!

LGR

Nice. Still have my copy around somewhere, but it's been lost during the last couple moves which is a shame since I would've liked to show it here

LGR

Precisely what was happening at that time, yep! Once the touch hardware caught up and the software improved it wasn't long before the idea took over.

LGR

Yep, it's something I'd like to get to eventually

LGR

Windows CE is something I still have yet to work with, although I have a couple devices that have it needing my attention. Sounds amusingly limited, heh.

LGR

Always kinda wanted to try a Zune! But by then I'd moved into early smartphones like the Blackberry so I never made that plunge.

LGR

I've reviewed four games in the past month, and one of those just went up on YouTube Friday. Seems you have some catching up to do ;) And if you do feel these hardware videos are lazy then, well, I guess I'm glad I make it look easy! This one video alone took about 35 hours.

LGR

I was a bit later than the PDA craze, but I remember when Microsoft had just released the Zune micros. Tiny little MP3 players with gorgeous displays, so much more capable than the iPod touches at the time (in my opinion, obviously). They did eventually release an HD version with a giant screen akin to smart phones of today, but I remember that tiny, inch-and-a-half wide screen, huddled over it playing a homebrew game of Doom using nothing but the swipe pad and the back and play/pause buttons. There's a special sort of nostalgia around this time, before app stores and walled gardens. It really was the wild west. Nobody knew exactly what worked, but so many people wanted to try, and as a curious consumer, it was a blast.

avfusion

Thankfully I haven't run into that with this one yet, but I'm sure that's only because it hasn't yet had the chance to bloat itself up!

LGR

Great review. By the way, is it me or has it been a while since you reviewed any games? (Putting the lazy into LGR?) lol

Gary Leigh

Indeed, in hindsight it's apparent that these were doomed to be stepping stones on the path towards modern smart phones. Certainly a fascinating time!

LGR

It is mentioned near the very start of the video when I say "calling this special is debatable" and say I'm talking about the 1950 series, then show the part of the box that says "RX1955" :) Will add more clarification next draft. EDIT: FIXED

LGR

Oooh that is annoying, have never had a DS so I'll keep that in mind for the future

LGR

I had some kind of Windows CE PDA around 2002, but I can't even recall what brand the hardware was. It was fun at first for the novelty of it, but quickly ended up in a drawer somewhere. It didn't have Wifi at all, or any kind of wireless connectivity. You had to use ActiveSync to connect it to anything, and it seemed to work only half the time. Even at the time I remember thinking the technology would be awesome in a few years, but wasn't ready for prime time.

Steve Lovelace

Oh, man, the Nintendo DS has the exact same problem with Wi-Fi. It's impossible to find a place to connect one. Worse, this system is hardcoded into the OS, that means you cannot do it even if playing a DS game on a 3DS, despite the fact that a 3DS will accept any kind of Wi-Fi with no issue. That means quite a bit of content (such as the downloadable puzzles from Professor Layton games) are pretty much completely lost.

Pablo Rodriguez

Very interesting product! Never really looked closely at something like this before, but on the other hand, I never got too familiar with PDAs in the first place. Question - the title of the video mentions the RX1955 model, but the new box you opened said RX1950. Are those two really similar? I noticed you didn't really address that in your video so I was just curious. As for me in college (began in 2006) I started with trying to take notes with my laptop but I ended up just using pen and paper soon after, too. Just felt easier to write by hand for some reason!

Lindsay Michelle

I had a bunch of PDA's starting around 1997 until the iPod Touch came out. The thing about the original iPhone that was stunning was how good the browser was, as well as the multi-touch UI. I very clearly remember talking to my friend, another tech guy, and thinking Apple had faked the original iPhone demo because the browser was sooo much faster and better than anything else you could get in a mobile device (not talking about laptops of course). Anywho my $700 Dell PDA overnight because a dinosaur. Also I LOVE Audible, been using it since 2003 or so. I hate hate hate reading, probably because I'm dyslexic, and pre-Audible I had read exactly one book cover to cover in my life. Now I read tons of magazines and newspapers, I mean tons and tons of them, but I can't read more than about 7-8 printed pages without my brain going into overload as it "transcodes" the text to something I understand. Anywho with Audible I've got well over 900 books, all history or bios, I don't read about goblins or wizards or any of that crap, and I love it. This is not a paid commercial.

Chris Munch

Have you considered doing a tech tales on the rise and fall of blackberry? I think that would a great topic to cover, me and my friends all had them when they were all the rage. Then iphone and android moved in and it was like BB ceased to exist.

Northvice

Add a sim card and you have a smartphone, basically.

Desmo

I had the Dell Axim in that article as well as the model prior to it. Recently re-bought Sim City but sold the Pocket PC probably about 10 years ago <a href="http://imgur.com/FCp4Jao" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://imgur.com/FCp4Jao</a>

Randall Strye

Neat! Love the serious Young LGR™ :D Btw, fun question, what would 19 year old Clint have said about the latest iPhone/iPads if he magically could have them back in 2005? Would he be just as amazed or...?

Anders Enger Jensen

Years after I stopped using my PDA my WinXP laptop still has that Activesync icon down in the taskbar... I don't think you can actually get rid of it once it's installed.

moosemaimer

I had a similar device running Windows Mobile 5.0 and that ran Virtual Pool, so Doom probably woudn't be much of a stretch for it.

moosemaimer

I would have loved something like this had I known it existed back then!

Terry Lee

seems like a common Experience with quite a few of us here, who either had a similar model, something from another Maker, etc. that the Windows Mobile experience, was more "Novel" than useful even when it started to merge into what we'd start to recognize as "Smart Phones" today. I have the Sprint HTC Mogul (PPC-6800) it was a model up from what i had in the day the 6700 and used it at my first con in '07 as Android phones back then were New , Way over priced! and the 6700 was a handme down (i had the Verizon XV6700 at that time) but after awhile from the convention it collected dust and i eventually sold it. now i have a nice Samsung Galaxy "Luna Pro" and use it for far more than these pocket PCs ever dreamed they could compared. and only got this Sprint HTC Mogul just for the nostalgia value.

Cael Thunderwing

I had an ipaq (rx 3100 I think) for a while. One of the first things I did was install SCUMMVM

Jessie Cook

BUT CAN IT RUN DOOM!? If it's got a CPU someone will make DOOM run on it. I shudder to think the amount of time I would have lost had I had one of these instead of my Palm 3xe when I was in school. Grade 7 is already half missing memories.

Garoninja

Mmmmm... wow blast from the past for me. My sister got an iPAQ around the same time as you but I wanted telephone capabilities so a couple of years later (after I got the money), I went with the Samsung SCH i760 w/ WM 6.1. The phone failed under Verizon insurance and was discontinued so I received the XV6800, which I still have to this day (I can go put my hands on it right now). I agree Clint, the size of these things were so small compared to the modern smartphone! I feel proud to be a part of the original "smartphone" era. Also, due to high data costs, wifi was also a must for me, albeit a limited selection). I'm so glad I didn't have the usefulness issues that others had, I assume because of my slide keyboard and cellular capabilities.

Christopher Bassett

I bought several of these PDAs over the years, starting with Palm devices and Windows CE devices, etc. They all seemed really exciting at the time, but much like your experience, I found that after a few weeks or months went by I discovered that it wasn't nearly as useful as I thought it would be and most anything I wanted to use it for wound up taking more time than more conventional methods. I just always liked the idea of keeping a computer with me at all times, but they just weren't that practical. Now, of course, with the Smart Phones of today, that is finally a reality.

The 8-Bit Guy

Oh wow! By the time the RX1955 came out i’d figured out why Palm OS over Windows mobile but I still have a folding keyboard that would work with it. Remember having to reset your Pocket PC about every day and a half because the bloody thing would freeze? 😂

Nicholas Wilson

In 2005, I went for the Palm Tungsten E2, no WiFi (70£ for the SDIO extension card) but Bluetooth sync was bliss. Looking forward to your upcoming Palm review :)

Bastien Nocera

I have a Dell Axim too! And I really love Bubble Breaker. It's the Solitaire of Pocket PC's. (Also, Sky Force Reloaded is a lot of fun with a stylus.)

Danny

I have a Dell Axim from 2003, I used it all the time, but now the charging pins are broken beyond repair.

Keiron Wedlin

Seems like that Audible link still really works.

Ossi K