Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)****14-month followup****
The good: Case, strap, and screen all in great shape despite daily wear. Has survived miscellaneous drops and brief immersions in water with no apparent damage or effect.
The annoying: Needs charging daily. The screen is still small! When I ride my bike on a bumpy road, the Palm OS crashes, and if I don't notice quickly and reset it, the battery goes dead (and then I have to re-enter all the setup data, and reload it). Lately it has been crashing badly (total restart) every couple of days, for no apparent reason.
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Below is the original Nov. 2005 review:
I bought the Abacus PDA a couple of weeks ago, mainly to replace the shredded memo pad I'd been trying to keep in my pocket, and to synchronize smoothly with my Microsoft Outlook system at work. Overall, it's everything I expected and it has become my almost-constant companion. A few specific comments:
- Battery life: The biggest problem with it. The battery life bar shows empty after two days, even though I only use the PDA function a couple minutes a day. Maybe it's like a gas gauge, and you really have another day before it dies? If you set it so the LCD display turns off when not in PDA mode (instead of showing the watch face), the life goes to about 4 days. By having the watch application running, you can see the time by simply pressing the enter button. Charging seems very fast, however, and it doesn't seem like you have to have it plugged into a computer to charge. Sadly, it did not charge from my laptop; it had to be plugged into AC.
- The watch is pretty big. Notice that nowhere are the dimensions shown in the specs? The actual size (ignoring the band) is 2.25" long x 1.88" wide by 0.50" thick, more or less. It's also quite heavy, with the stainless case. Display is 1" square. It looks kind of bulky on my fairly large wrist; it would look absurd on my wife's slender wrist. But those of you who carry purses everywhere can get a normal-size PDA.
- Entering data is hard with the tiny screen. Amazingly, the keyboard works pretty well, though I had to run the digitizer calibration option a couple times before the letters I hit lined up with the ones on the screen. However, they're hard to see in dim light, and the touch screen doesn't respond as predictably as I'd like, sometimes giving a letter and sometimes not. I tried Jot briefly, with moderate success, and may try it more later.
- You can look things up entirely with the buttons (no stylus), which is great.
- I wish it was waterproof; I have to take it off at the health club, etc. But I've dropped it on concrete, banged it into a bunch of things (it's a lot bigger than my old watch, after all), and washed my hands while wearing it (oops!), getting it wet, all with no apparent damage.
- Syncronization with Outlook was a breeze to set up, and takes only a couple of seconds. Now I have about 500 contacts, my schedule, and a dozen lists on my wrist. Plus a calculator. Cool!
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