Windows Phone Thoughts: Take Another Loox - The N560 Pocket PC Reviewed

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Take Another Loox - The N560 Pocket PC Reviewed

Posted by Doug Raeburn in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM


Using the N560
The N560 is constructed of plastic with a very high quality feel. It has an understated and contemporary "executive" appearance that I find very appealing. As much as I like the size and weight of the 720, the slightly smaller size and lighter weight of the N560 makes it fit even better in my hand. It feels very compact... as close to perfect as any I can remember.

Although the screen is slightly smaller than the 720's, it's very bright, with great contrast and vivid color. It seems to me to be even better than the excellent 720 screen.

The N560 is quick to respond, feeling as fast as the 720 for most uses. Although the N560 has a faster processor, the 720 has the speed advantage inherent to RAM storage. The difference is nearly imperceptible when data is retrieved from storage. Writing to storage is a different story altogether, at least when large amounts of data are concerned.

I've been storing my company's entire phone directory for several years now. That currently consists of just under 7,000 contacts. With the 720, storing these contacts in RAM, it took around 5 minutes to import these contacts from my PC. The N560 took around 2 hours to import these same contacts to its slower flash ROM. Clearly, writing very large amounts of data to storage is not the forte of the N560 (or other WM2005 units). Fortunately, the situation that prompted me to store all of these contacts has changed, so I won't be doing this anymore. This is the one concession that I had to make to persistent storage. Note that typical small amounts of data (a single appointment or contact or a Word Mobile document, for example) take just a tick longer than before to save.

So far, the overall stability of the N560 has been impressive. I've run PlanMaker and TextMaker on my last three Pocket PCs, and they always seemed somewhat sluggish, as if they were more than the unit could handle. And I'd have to do soft resets more often than I would have liked.

On the other hand, these same applications are noticeably more responsive on the N560, and resets of any type have been rare. Is this a matter of the faster processor? The OS revisions? Other hardware factors? I may never know... for now, I'm assuming that there are multiple factors at play and I'll just enjoy this much improved user experience.

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