 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Toshiba e740 Pocket PC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
User Submitted Toshiba e740 Pocket PC Reviews (cont...)Date: 2004-04-27 Its not secure if you dont store info on real pc My Pocket has been reseted 4 times already, I have only used it 4 weeks in the 3 months that I have it, it is really disapointing losing your information. With this gadget you have to be lucky first, and be on top of charging it all the time. To me it simply sucks. Date: 2004-04-07 Avoid Toshiba; poor product, even worse support 1. Despite being sold with the understanding that Pocket PC 2003 would be supported, the company dropped support for upgrading the e740. 2. The unit will randomly lose sync with the desktop computer. Despite two ROM updates this has never been corrected (and a tech support supervisor told me on the phone that this is "normal...they aren't meant to stay synced with the desktop for more than a few minutes"). 3. Backups are a good practice in computers. The e740 has two backup utilities (one to a storage card, the other via ActiveSync to the desktop). However, you best hope you never have problems with these, as they are not supported by the company (same tech as above told me there was no support for any backup utility included with the PDA, despite it being included with/documented in the manual for the PDA and being a suggested action prior to sending in for service). 4. Battery: good life, compared to my iPaq, but...if it drains to 0% (or you take it out...it's removable), all programs/files in memory are erased. There was a recall, but mine wasn't included...it was for this exact problem. Since my e740's serial number didn't fall in the recall range, they wouldn't cover it. And again the tech mentioned above told me this was by design. I gather from this that Toshiba considers wiping your memory to switch removable batteries and not having a workable backup utility to be normal in the PDA world. 5. Sad, as it had good potential and some nice features (i.e., two card slots, pretty good battery life, nice design). Date: 2004-03-18 The biggest pile of junk Frequent crashes cause data loss. PDA freezes often, forcing you to soft reset which doesn't always work, then you have to hard reset, lose all your data and you have to reset all your owner information too. Battery is a joke. The guy at Toshiba said if you actually use an SD card and turn Wifi off you get only 1 1/2 hours of juice! Turn Wi-Fi on and forget about it. Can't save appointments to SD card. Must back up frequently. My appointment reminders sometimes FREEZE the unit forcing me to soft reset, which also sometimes deletes my data. The setup process is annoying after numerous resets as you have to go through it every time. The battery meter lies about the juice, saying it has 90% and all of a sudden it shuts down from battery loss. The unit also tells you, you are running low on battery even if you just charged it. Toshiba had a recall on the battery for half their units, but if you didn't have the right model number, it doesn't qualify for the recall and they won't fix it. Read all the other reviews - I wasn't the only one with these problems. It's present in 33% of their units, which is not a track record I'm comfortable with. If you call Toshiba they will actually ARGUE with you that you are wrong and they are right. Horrible! I wrote two letters to customer service and they IGNORE my letters. They refuse to take the PDA back for service and now the warranty has expired. All the positive reviews you see are from editors and others who used the PDA for 30 minutes or so. Then it seems like the best unit out there. Try to actually use it practically and you will want to throw it in the trash in about a week. DONT BUY THIS UNIT. Date: 2004-03-08 1 star too many simply put, one expensive piece of junk Date: 2004-02-28 Wireless Access is Good but Battery Life is Poor! More than a year ago I made a switch from the PalmOS-based Handspring Visor to this PocketPC-run Toshiba e740. The switch was motivated by my desire for native Windows compatibility and for a built-in wireless capability. At both fronts Toshiba e740 has performed as advertised. Syncing with Microsoft Outlook is effortless and cruising the Internet on my wireless Linksys home network is flawless. What I didn't expect was such a short battery life, and the poorly designed stylus and its holder. I believe that the poor battery life is due to both high consumption and frequent inadvertent turning of the devise on rather than due to insufficient battery capacity. (The standard battery is rated by Toshiba at a decent 1000 mAh). Even after checking address book and calendar only a few times during the day one may drain the battery to 60% of its full capacity even with moderate screen brightness. Toshiba support staff gave me several explanations for this high battery consumption mainly that the unit uses electricity to communicate with the add-on storage cards even when e740 is off. The more important reason for the poor battery life, in my opinion, is the unintentional turning on of the device in my pant's pocket. Along the upper left side of the devise sticks out the Recorder button. Pressing the button turns e740 on and launches the Recorder function. The button cannot be deactivated and it is almost impossible not to depress it while having the PDA in the pant's pocket. I tried several leather cases: (1) Toshiba sleeve shipped with e740, which is ugly and useless; (2) Belkin SKU 772053 leather case (which is compact but ineffective in stopping inadvertent activation of the Recorder button), and (3) Toshiba zipped case PA1313U-1PCS (which is effective but so bulky that there is no pant's pocket large enough to accommodate it). Another annoying feature is the flimsy plastic stylus that won't stay in its holder because the only thing that is supposed to keep it in is the friction between the very top of the stylus and the top of the plastic-lined holder. Buying replacement plastic styli from Toshiba (PA3182U-1ETC) will only waste your money as these styli won't stay put in e740 either. If you ask Toshiba support staff for help, they will tell you to put some Scotch tape around the stylus. Wow! Through trial and error I have found these two solutions for above problems: (1) aluminum case from Rhinoskin (here at amazon.com), and (2) metal stylus from pdapanache.com. Finally I can now enjoy all the wonderful things that come with e740.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ©2004 SimplyHandhelds, All rights reserved. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
