Toshiba e800 Bluetooth PDA review

Toshiba has built itself a reputation for producing highly serviceable, well put together PDAs with a serious leaning towards the business user. This is not to say that Toshiba ignores consumers, but rather that it sways product design and marketing towards the corporate sector.

This market focus is in part why Toshiba has had a consistent policy of introducing hardware-identical versions of devices with either Bluetooth or WiFi integrated: the corporate customer can then choose which wireless mode best suits them without compromising on other features.

Toshiba has followed the same strategy with the e800 which comes in Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless varieties. I am looking at the Bluetooth version here, but it is the same price as the WiFi version, and the only other differences between the two are a slight weight hike for the WiFi version (198g as opposed to 195g), and some wireless appropriate software differences. Note that when you see the e800 advertised as supporting Voice over IP it is the WiFi version to which that applies, and to take advantage you will need a separate subscription to a service provider.

Two things stuck me as soon as I lifted the e800 from its box: the stylish blue casing, which is eye catching and makes a change from the very samey colouring of most PDAs, and the slightly large size of the hardware. The size is due to a screen which measures a massive four inches diagonally. I am among the group of PDA users who have often wished for a larger screen – and here it is. The screen quite obviously requires a larger than usual casing in which to live, and both pockets and hands will notice the few extra millimetres all round.

But Toshiba has taken the opportunity to do something very clever with the extra screen space – pop in a graphics adaptor with its very own 2MB of SRAM, and give users the option of driving the screen at 640 x 480 pixels. To get to this resolution you use a software switch that sits on the start menu. Selecting it causes a soft reset and a few seconds of waiting. To get back to standard 240 x 320 you again go through a soft reset.

The high resolution display is a bit of a mixed bag. The standard Pocket PC applications don’t support the resolution, and nor, actually does much else. Toshiba provides the ClearVue Suite from Westtek which allows you to look at, but not work with, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and a range of image formats. Reading Word documents without scrolling horizontally requires them to be rendered to a very small font indeed – it’s not advisable to do this for long periods and some people will find it simply too hard on they eye to bother with at all.

Also it is irritating that you need to effectively soft reset every time you want to switch resolutions, and finally, in standard 240 x 320 the display looks rather blocky due to relatively large pixel size. In short, I wasn’t actually as impressed by the high resolution as I had expected to be. I can see, though, that with increased application support, landscape viewing modes, and good (W)LAN access to web and other content, that this feature could become something very useful indeed.

Of course there is more to this Pocket PC than its screen. The processor, an Intel PXA 263 runs at 400MHz, marking out the e800 as top of the range. There is a massive amount of on board memory. 128MB of RAM is supplemented by 32MB of user accessible Flash ROM. This is becoming pretty much the standard for higher end Pocket PCs, so it’s not surprising to see Toshiba use this configuration here.