Anyone using a PocketPC for music?

[Watchdog]

I bought my wife a PocketPC for Christmas. It looks like a really cool device and I thought of getting one for myself. Now I don't want to carry around an iPod, a cell phone AND a pocketPC. So I was wondering what the sound quality of PocketPCs are and if anyone uses them for portable listening.

It's her present so I don't think she'd appreciate me hi-jacking it so quickly.

I figured there must be at least a couple of members using these devices for music. So what do you think?

 

[feverish]

I used it once, I didn't like it very much because of the lack of control you have over the playlist and library. (nonexstent)

 

[nismo96]

I used to own an Ipaq 3630 PocketPC and carried around several songs encoded in WMA format on a CF card. It sapped the battery life out of the PDA very quickly and the sound quality was barely decent. I can't speak for any media player apps on current PocketPC2003 devices as they use a newer OS and many of the programs that I used on my PPC no longer work. I now use a Palm OS PDA and listen to OGG Vorbis files on it. The sound quality on the Palm is pretty good. Once again, music takes it toll on the battery charge of my current PDA, but it keeps it charge better than my three year old PPC did when it was new.

My personal recommendation, based on battery life only, is to have a seperate music device or keep an extra charging cable at home, the office, and in your glove box in the car.

 

[IpaqMan]

BTW, the new WM2003 devices have better battery life for playing music.

I use my PocketPC HP 2215 for music and Audible content. It has two slots, one of which I use for a 1GB microdrive. The SD slot holds my standard PDA software. The MD holds the audio content.

Along with the 2215, I use the extended battery pack (3600mah) which gives 20 to 30 hours of battery life (conservative estimate). The normal battery gives up to 10 hours of battery life.

To improve battery usage, I use Iplay as my MP3 player. It supports only Ogg and MP3. Its pluses are very low CPU usage, excellent sound quality (compared to all other software), great functionality (buttons, options, PPC support), great equalizer, and support for hard drives.

Its minuses are: not free and not a fancy GUI.

With some PPCs, you can add a 5GB PC card hard drive and have a lot of music with your PPC.

BTW, Compaq/HP includes excellent sound hardware internally in most of its PDAs.

 

[nismo96]

That's terrific Ipaqman. PPC have come a long way. My Palm is nice too, I've got a Palm T3 and there's a free OGG player for it, but I still use my minidisc player for music much more than I use the Palm.

 

[fredpb]

The 1945 sounds pretty good. You need a big SD memory card for music though, at least 256mb, and that ain't much.

You need plenty of room for backups, because it is easy to drain the battery with audio. You don't notice it's down because you enjoying the music.