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For a long time there was little dispute that HP’s iPAQ was the pinnacle of Pocket PC design. However, some may find the design of its latest range to be too much of a radical departure. Those of a more conservative bent might instead might want to look at the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 420.

Fujitsu Siemens has been a player in the Pocket PC market for some time and has produced some feature rich products in the past, but it has tended to lag behind HP in terms of chassis design.

The Pocket Loox 420 should address this however. For a start it’s much smaller than previous devices from Fujitsu-Siemens, and at 138g is a lot more pocket friendly. However, it’s not just small but also offers solid build quality. It might not be made out of metal, but it feels well built and should be quite tough wearing.

The design is fairly square, though this ensures that the PDA looks like a business tool rather than a glorified toy. The square buttons add even more to the corporate look, although the directional button is a little to use, especially as it has a select button in the middle, rather than being of the push down type.

The four surrounding buttons provides quick access to the calendar, the contacts, the home screen and what is referred to as the FSC SpeedMenu, which provides quick access to various applications. There’s also a hardware quick access button for the voice recorder on the top left hand side.

At the bottom left hand side is an IrDA port, which is one of three wireless connectivity options. Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless networking are also built-in while the SDIO compatible SD card slot provides even more connectivity options. However, you may want to save that slot for an extra memory card as the Loox 420 only comes with 32MB of ROM and 64MB or RAM. To be fair, this is the norm for Pocket PCs from most manufacturers, but seeing that HP is starting to increase this, I would expect others to follow suit. As it stands 56.6MB is available, shared between storage and system memory.

What I did miss is the built in backup memory found on most iPAQ’s. Having a small amount of flash memory dedicated for backups can be very handy. Fujitsu Siemens supplies its own utility that allows you to backup data unto an SD card, but this isn’t quite as convenient and adds extra cost.

Processor wise, Fujitsu Siemens has chosen the Intel route with a PXA255 400MHz CPU. This has enough grunt to handle just about any tasks you would expect your PDA to perform and should be compatible with more software than PDAs based on non Intel processors.

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