Windows Phone Thoughts: Dell Axim X50: Dual Slot Goodness at a Reasonable Price

Be sure to register in our forums! Share your opinions, help others, and enter our contests.


Digital Home Thoughts

Loading feed...

Laptop Thoughts

Loading feed...

Android Thoughts

Loading feed...



Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Dell Axim X50: Dual Slot Goodness at a Reasonable Price

Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 12:00 PM


Memory & Storage Space
The mid-range Axim X50 comes with 64 MB of RAM, of which 62.76 MB is user-accessible when you first start up the device (which is more than average). The 128 MB of ROM has a spacious 93.39 MB left over as a user-accessible storage card, although I only had 89.61 MB of that even after manually clearing it out (and deleting the hidden files). I'd like to see Dell provide a tool to completely clear out the Flash ROM area. Now here's where we come to the part of the review where some of my readers will vehemently disagree with me: I don't believe any Pocket PC needs to come with 128 MB of RAM if there's sufficient ROM space. In every use of my Pocket PC, I've never needed that much RAM space. I've heard of GPS scenarios where maps need gobs of memory to load, even when they're stored on a memory card, but I can't help but think this is just sloppy programming.

I was going to explain why in this review, but my tests require an article all on their own, so I'll leave it at this: I installed 20 different applications, from games to utilities, into the Flash ROM area. I barely managed to use up half of the space, and every single one of those applications worked well from the Flash ROM. The only problem I noticed is that drawing the icons takes longer than it should because Flash ROM is slower than RAM. This only happens after a soft reset – once the icons are drawn they are cached and everything is snappy again. The short version is that Pocket PC owners, myself included, need to think of Flash ROM has the "hard drive" where we should be installing our applications.

Battery Life
The mid-range X50 comes with an 1100 mAH battery, which is 150mAH bigger than the battery in the X30. Unfortunately, due to the short period of time I've had the X50 for (only a few days) and the fact that Spb Benchmark doesn't seem to want to play nice with the X50, I haven't been able to get any battery benchmark numbers put together. By way of comparison, the 950mAH battery in the X30 is adequate, but not the type of battery that would allow you to use WiFi for many hours without worrying about draining the battery.

Here's a test I performed with the X30 that might give you some idea about the battery life on the X50: I turned on WiFi, put the backlight to medium (four notches above off), and set the CPU to auto. I then set Pocket Internet Explorer to a page with 128 KB total of mixed text and images that would refresh every ten seconds. This test was designed to simulate an average Web browsing experience. The X30 lasted for 2:09 hours until it complained about a low battery, 2:25 hours until the WiFi turned off (at 14% battery life), and it lasted 4:47 hours total until the unit shut off completely - that's right, two hours of idle time with the screen on and WiFi turned off. The X50's battery is roughly 14% bigger, so I'd expect the X50 to perform roughly 14% longer than the X30 (all things being equal). Assuming I can get the Spb Benchmark battery tests to work, I'll update this review with more battery information.

Tags:

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...