PDA’s and Smartphones are in that medival phase of their life much the way PC’s were in the Windows 3.11 & Win95 days, where you find something really cool then suffer from lack of drivers and other annoying road-blocks.
My basic goal when I started to delve into PDA’s was to get something I could team with a portable keyboard to use for taking notes in class. I have a netbook, but even with as small as the netbook is, it’s annoying lugging it around in the backpack. Plus, the netbook was a bit pricey compared to getting a used PDA (or so I thought).
I started my adventure, in hind-sight, completely a**-backwards. You see, I thought, like any reasonable person, that I could pick out a PDA that I really liked, and would be able to easily snatch up a keyboard for it form a slew of options out there. I was so wrong. I got the hx4605 used from a guy for $100, and it seemed like a really awesome deal (and it was). I went for it since it had the really awesome screen, with crystal-clear resolution and beautiful clear type text. When you get this thing into portrait mode, it’s very wonderful. It would make the perfect, portable word processing solution.
But then my nightmare started. The availability of portable keyboards for this (and for Pocket PC’s in general), is severly lacking. Basically, your options are …
The ThinkOutside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard. It’s the best on the market, unfortunately it has very limited driver / pda support, and iGo, the company that bought the intellectual property, isn’t very supportive with it anymore. There is no driver for the hx4705, but if you’re lucky you can dig one up from xda-developers forums or such to get it to work on your hx4705.
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