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Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today's thing is the Hewlett-Packardi PAQ RX1950 PDA, released in September of 2005 for an asking price of $299.

More specifically though this is a brand new in box, still sealed example of the rather special model known as the RX1955!

Well okay

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings and welcome to an LGR thing!And today's thing is the Hewlett-PackardiPAQ RX1950 PDA, released in Septemberof 2005 for an asking price of $299.More specifically though this is a brand newin box, still sealed example of the ratherspecial model known as the RX1955! Well okay, calling it \"special\" is a bit of anexaggeration here. What I mean is that itholds special meaning to *ME* being thatit was my first PDA, or personal digitalassistant. The only real differencebetween the RX1950 and 1955 is that theformer was sold on a corporate marketand the latter was sold at retail. Andspeaking of retail, PDAs were at theheight of their popularity in the mid2000s and I'd had my mind set on gettingone for years by 2005. This one stood outto me for several reasons back then butlet's get to some context first. I was19 years old in 2005, just startingcollege, and found myself working oddjobs all over town. The main things Iwanted to do were take notes, listen toMP3s, browse the web through Wi-Fi, and ofcourse I wanted to play some games whilenot smiling. Nowadays it's easy enough tojust grab a tablet or a smartphone andbe done with it but back then, nah man.Tablets were way too expensive andcumbersome and my cell phone was one ofthese beauties: an LG VX6100. Not exactlya productivity powerhouse with itsresolution of 96 x 64. But hey it had aVGA camera, that was neat! So with myneeds in mind and the technologyavailable, my two real options in 2005 werea laptop or a PDA. And while a laptop fitmost of my needs I didn't really havethe money to get the ones I wanted andthe idea of hauling something that largeto class in my already stuffed backpackwas not appealing. So that led me to theiPAQ RX1955, which at the time was oneof HP's entry-level PDAs. They had awhole range of iPAQ devices back thenand to be honest, I found most of thempretty ugly. But not the RX1955. Right onthe front of the box you can see why Ichose this model: not only did it looksleek and stylish but it hadbuilt-in Wi-Fi, ran Windows Mobile 5,and featured SDIO card expandability.These were three things I had almost noexperience with at that point and I washighly intrigued by the possibilities ofbeing able to put my files and MP3s onan SD card and mess around with all thatkind of stuff. But also with WindowsMobile and the whole Pocket PC ecosystem, and using Windows with a touchscreen wassuper appealing to me at the time. Andhey check out that Samsung logo on thebox, what's that about?Well the RX1950 series made use of a300 megahertz Samsung SC32442,which was a 32-bit multi stacked package,based on the ARM920T core, thatintegrated a wide array of CPU, memory,and I/O functions into a single chip 14millimeters across. The result was thatit may not have been the fastest chip ofits day but it was relatively cheap anddrew little power. Enough technicaldetails for the moment, it's time tobreak that seal after it's languished insome overstocked warehouse for 13 years!Oh yeah, this is exciting! I sold off myoriginal rRX1955 forever ago so Ihaven't seen this stuff in ages! Atop thefirst layer of packaging is thedocumentation, shrink-wrapped for yourprotection, as well as this informativequick start guide on the underside ofthe box lid, and an equally informativebut less necessary section on the frontadvertising several of the optionalaccessories you could buy from HP. And onthe second layer down you get a neatlittle tray holding the iPAQ itselfand, man. Just holding this againimmediately brings back memories. Although it seems a bit smaller than I remembersomehow, but actually that's probablyjust because I'm used to usinggargantuan 7-inch smartphones these days. Next you get the USB sync and chargingcable, the power adapter, the battery, anda simple fabric carrying case. Let's goahead and open up that documentationbundle before going further though,starting with the manual that looks moresubstantial than it really is. There areonly about 45 pages of it per languageand most of what it contains can belearned just by using the device and itsbuilt-in tutorials. You also receive a\"Getting Started CD,\" which contains thesoftware to sync it with a Windows PCand all that kind of stuff. You also getanother ad for more HP products andaccessories, including some lovely-lookingleather cases that I still kind of want.As well as some information onwarranties and end-user licenseagreements that I, of course, absolutelyread cover to cover. And hey look, anotherad, this one for audible.com. Nyeh-heh, yeah not sponsored. Man they just have not letoff the gas have they?And yes that free month still appliesbut only because they've never stoppedgiving away free months to anything thatmoves. And hey look, yet another ad, thistime for Smartphone and Pocket PCMagazine. Yeah they must have justrebranded it when they printed this,I remember when it was just called PocketPC Magazine for a while. Well enough of that,time for some plastic peeling perfection!Ah that feels right. And because I can'twait to play with this again let's justplug in the battery and see if it works.It does! Although it'll certainly needsome charging still, though the batteryheld enough juice all this time to getthrough the initial setup. Stuff likecalibrating the touch screen and settingthe time of day. Sweet. So to get thisthing charged up using the wall adapterwe'll need both that and the Active Synccable because there's nowhere to plugthis in directly from the wall to theiPAQ. That goes in the bottom thereand then this whole thing plugs into thePDA. You *can* also charge it directlythrough USB with a newer third-partycable, but from the factory you did needboth cables combined to get power.This was pretty normal for PDAs like this. On the top from left to right you get athree-and-a-half millimeter headphonejack, a spot to plug in SD or MMC cards,and a spot to store your stylus, which ispretty necessary. This doesn't have acapacitive touchscreen, you will bepressing down to get things to work.And I always kind of liked how it has thisfake SD card, I guess to keep the slotfrom getting dirt and crap in there. Andinstead of putting a little protector ontop they were just like, \"here's a blankpiece of plastic to put in there.\"So turning it on is as simple as pressingthe 'on' button. And you get these two LEDs up atthe top: the left one is the Wi-Fiindicator and the right one shows ifit's charging or needs charging. And onthe bottom you get some physical buttons.Mostly they're for shortcuts toapplications, but bydefault holding down this one actuallychanges the screen orientation fromportrait to landscape mode, a handylittle thing indeed since this doesn'thave any accelerometers or anything todo that automatically. Along the righthand side here you'll see this littlesilver switch which is for opening thebattery bay. That's really all that does.On the left-hand side you'll see thislittle cassette tape symbol beside thisbutton here, and pressing thatimmediately opens up the voice recordingmode. And yes this does have a microphone built-in.\"This is a direct recording fromthe iPAQ. Not the greatest microphoneI've ever heard, but not the worst either.\"Along the bottom is where you plug inyour Active Sync cable and you also getthis little port here for IrDA. This isthe infrared interface so if you had anysoftware that, say, acted as a virtualremote control you can actually controlyour TV, your A/V receiver, anything withinfrared that can be programmed. And youcould use your PDA as a smart remotewhich was pretty awesome in 2005. Okay so let's dive into the interface, and reallythe Windows Mobile Pocket PC experiencefor a bit, because this is not onlysomething that intrigued me a whole lotnearly 2000s but it really kind of stilldoes. I enjoy seeing Windows crammed into a smaller environment like this andcomparing it to the desktop experience. Imean, you still get a Start Menu, youstill have a control panel full of allthe settings that you would expect.In fact, some things that you might *not*expect,depending on your expectations. Like theability to remap every single one of thebuttons on this thing, except for thepower button of course. So if you want toswap anything to pretty much anythingelse, yeah, you can do that. You can make adedicated Solitaire button if you want to,doesn't matter, it lets you do it. This isalso where you can apply all sorts ofbattery-saving options, brightnesssettings, things like that. Although dueto the hardware that this uses, like Imentioned earlier, the battery life isreally good. At least on a fresh batteryback in the day, you could get over 9even up to 10 hours of battery lifedepending on what you're doing. In myexperience, this older battery, it onlyholds about three or four hours butstill not terrible considering this is a1,100 mAH battery from 2005.Something that is not so cool thoughabout the RX1955 is the memorysituation.It came with a 64 megabyte ROMas well as 32 megs of SDRAM. But yeah itdoesn't leave you with a whole lot, sohaving a half-decent SD card in there isabsolutely a requirement as far as I'mconcerned. And again if you're familiarwith the Windows environment andnavigating all that kind of stuff thenthe File Explorer acts very much likeWindows Explorer. And you have plenty offamiliar folders like My Documents,Program Files, Temp, and Windows. And anySD or MMC cards that you insert willshow up as a folder in here. As forall the applications that came on the1955 it's pretty much your generic PDAtype stuff. You get a calendar for doingcalendar-scheduling things, you get acontacts list for adding contacts toyour list, mostly for email because thisis not a smartphone -- you can't callanyone or text anyone. But if you wantedto communicate in some way, eitherdirectly to another iPAQ or over theInternet, you can do that. You also get acalculator for doing very specificcalculations, and then you have PocketMSN. And I actually did use this back inthe day for a little bit because I hadHotmail at one point. You also get aNotes app where you can handwrite inyour own notes here. And yes it does havehandwriting recognition which actuallyit was pretty accurate, I was alwaysimpressed with how well that it handledmy sloppy handwriting. This version ofWindows Mobile 5 also came with somepretty basic Microsoft Office suiteprograms, such as PowerPoint Mobile whichdoesn't actually let you createpowerpoints, but if you had any that youput on your SD card then you could viewthem. And you also got Word Mobile, whichis an incredibly simple word processor.And that was fine althoughtyping on this little tiny screen isjust not something you wanted to do,especially in my case. I was at school,I wanted to use this thing for takingnotes in class, and I did. But usually Iwould just write it in the Notes app. Orwhat I did is actually got one of thosefold-out keyboards. I don't have thatanymore but it would plug in the ActiveSync thing and kind of created a littlecradle situation. But yeah, don't expecta whole lot in terms of customization orformatting of your documents, you get agrand total of two fonts: Tahomaor Courier New. That's it, no Word Arthere. But hey, no Clippy either so youtake your wins where you can get them.Even more limitedthough is Excel Mobile. I can't imagineanyone ever did any kind of serious workwith spreadsheets on this little screen.I would hate to actually make asubstantial spreadsheet on this. It'sokay for doing edits to existing ones Isuppose. Now let's get to some of themore enjoyable, fun applications likeWindows Media Player, which of courselets you play media like MP3s and WMAfiles.That was a huge reason that Iwanted a PDA, I never had an iPod. I've stillnever had an iPod. So I was alwaysinterested in devices like this that letme do all sorts of things in addition toplaying MP3s. And you could also view anddo some very basic image manipulationwith photographs, stuff like rotating andcropping and that's about it. And yesthere actually was a camera add-on forthis device, which I never had. I wouldstill like to get one just to try it out.But yeah it was pretty neat to be ableto take photos around with you like this,especially with digital cameras backthen. I mean my HP digital camera had aone-inch display in 2005, so this onebeing almost four inches was prettyawesome. It also made it pretty great forwatching back video files in the WindowsMedia Video format.The speaker is not particularly great but it was pretty cool with headphones. And you know, it's a320x240 resolution screen, that's nota massive amount or anything but itdoesn't really need it. This is a threepoint seven inch diagonal screen andit's in 16-bit color. The pixel densityis really not that bad,I definitely watched a few episodes ofPrison Break on this back in the day.And then finally there's the wirelesscapability of this thing, which comes inthe form of built-in Wi-Fi. And no, thisdoes not have Bluetooth, which a lot ofreviewers dinged this device for back inthe day but I didn't really care aboutBluetooth. Wi-Fi it was all I cared aboutand this iPAQ came with 802.11b supportbuilt-in. Still totally usable dependingon the network you're trying to connectto, but I've found that there are quite afew places and devices that no longerbroadcast an 802.11b signal and stickto G or N. But an even bigger issuecan be the wireless encryptionand more often than not this is a realroadblock seeing as this device predatesWPA2 being mandatory. It doesn't seem tosupport it at all so you have to findsomething with WPA, WEP, or just noencryption at all. And you can probablyget around that issue at home with yourown router but connecting to publicWi-Fi in coffee shops or randombusinesses is a real toss-up. Most spotsI tried don't have the right signal,don't use a supported encryption method,or they require a login webpage that theiPAQ didn't know what to do with,treating what should be clickablebuttons as text. Or not loading at all,sometimes even crashing the program.Heck it'll do that when you're just trying toload any number of modern websites.The browser in general is just too outdatedto be very usable, it won't even loadGoogle or anything with HTTPS. And really,this browser sucked in 2005 as well,which is why I ended up installing Operafor Pocket PCs even back then. Well that'senough of that, let's move on to thegaming side of things. Starting with thetwo rather lackluster games that it comespre-installed with, the first one beingMicrosoft Solitaire. Which is justSolitaire. And Bubble Breaker, which isone of these things where you just kindof try to pop as many objects togetheras you can. As long as there are two aremore connected then you can pop them.And that's it, incredibly basic games thatdoes not do this device justicewhatsoever. Because really the RX1955,and all sorts of Pocket PCs from the mid2000s, are quite capable gaming machines. And of course getting games on thereoften meant that you had to plug it intoa PC and get it going that way. This isthe CD that it came with installingunder Windows XP and once that getsgoing, Active Sync will do its thing andsync any of your information on your PCthat you tell it to. Or you can use it asan interface between your iPAQ and anydownloaded programs that you want toinstall onto the machine. Or if youdon't want to do it that way or if yourprogram, say, came in a CAB file -- which alot of homebrew and more illegitimatepackages do -- then you can just open upthe Pocket PC right in Windows Explorerand then just copy and paste the CABfiles and then open them directly fromthe iPAQ. And there you go, it's notgonna ask for much of any verification.It might say, \"oh unknown publisher,\" butthere's nothing stopping you frominstalling pretty much anything you wanton this thing. So yeah let's just checkout a few of the games that I bought ordemoed back in the day starting with theofficial port of SimCity 2000.I actually bought this physically, I believe it was a Best Buy or something. They had a wholesection of Pocket PC games and softwarethat you could buy boxed for a few years.And yeah, this one in particular SimCity2000 is pretty good. That pixel art looksfantastic on this little tiny screen andyou know what? It plays pretty well.Probably runs it better than my 66megahertz 486 did back in the day really.I was also really fond of a lot of theAstraware games, in particular the onesfrom PopCap. You know before they became microtransaction-laden, free-to-play garbage.Games like Bejeweled 2 werepretty great because it was really justthe same game as you would get on adesktop PC but in a handheld format.And that was so cool, at least for the time.And I really liked playing it with thestylus. In fact, pretty much any game thatwas meant to be played with a mousepointer is great with a stylus -- if notbetter sometimes -- because you get reallydirect control such as with PopCap's andAstraware's version of Zuma. In factthe control is so precise that it almostmakes the gameplay trivial. You justpoint and tap to wherever you want yourballs to go. So yeah I ended up spendinga lot of time downloading and trying outall of the Astraware games. And thenthere were independent, freely-releasedhomebrew games like Wolfenstein 3D here.This one just comes with the sharewareversion but you can install the full oneas well if you had the files to go withit. And yeah it's a pretty darnedaccurate port of Wolfenstein,it's really only held back by thecontrol scheme here. And that only makessense, that little directional pad on thebottom of the unit is just not made formoving around in games. For one thing ithas a button in the middle of it so ifyou try to rock it around with yourfinger you end up pressing the button,which activates something else -- it justdoesn't feel good at all anyway. Andsince you don't have any buttons on theother side of the unit, either on the topor the right in this case, you have totap on the screen to do things like fireand open doors. And it's kind of noveland it friggin works, but that's about it.You'd really want to plug in a keyboardif you were gonna play these games forany length of time. And the same goes foremulators, of which, yes there were a tonfor Windows Mobile and Pocket PCs.And they were pretty capable due to thehardware, this one right here is PocketNester, which allows you to play NES andFamicom games. And you know what, it doesa pretty good job. Again the problem isthe control scheme. These buttons arejust not made for gaming. Again it's notlike a modern phone, it's not acapacitive touchscreen, you don't getmulti-touch at all. So it just doesn'tmake sense for any kind of virtual keyor controller layout. But yeah that'spretty much it for the iPAQ RX1955!A machine that I am very fond of at thispoint but you know what?Back in 2006 -- or really I guess 2007 -- welllet's just say the honeymoon perioddidn't last very long. I think I had thisthing for about six, seven months andthen I was like \"nah man.\" I sold it offand bought myself a Blackberry Pearl Because honestly the screen was just toosmall to do any kind of serious work inclass or anywhere for that matter.I ended up just taking notes on paper andthen using a Blackberry for things likeMP3s and keeping a calendar and contactslist and doing Wi-Fi all that.And besides it had a data plan and I couldjust use mobile internet through, I guessit was Suncom at that point and thenthey moved onto T-Mobile. But anyway theBlackBerry did really most of what Iwanted on the iPAQ, other than thegames. And for the games I ended upbuying myself a PSP-2000.And that just satisfied me for a long time, as far as doing portable gaming with physicalcontrols and a lot of support forhomebrew software. Like, it's so easy tosoftmod one of those things and yeah.With a Blackberry and a PSP that justdidn't make sense to hold on to the iPAQ for very long. But it is stillsomething that I absolutely have had ablast going back to mess with now, whichbrought a very healthy dose of happy nostalgia in equal parts with a healthy doseof reality and why I got rid of it inthe first place. Still though, it's kindof reignited my passion for Pocket PCs andnow I'm looking at some of the othersback then that would have been evenbetter options. And I'm sure I'll berevisiting these kind of mid-2000smobile devices in the future so if youenjoyed this video I definitelyrecommend sticking around. I haveanother couple in the works already, oneis from palm and one is from Swedenlet's put it that way. But anyway enoughof this ramble for this video, and Ithank you very much for watching!\n"