Test driving an XDA

I'm getting one of these curtesy of 02 on thursday.
What sort of fun can I have with this toy?
How fast is this GPRS-it seems to have good quality windows media player-aparently I can download the latest news in video curtesy of Sky etc-Would this not take a long time??

I'm being given a 1mb download allowance to start off-this seems very small if I'm to be watching some video? how much should I have and at what extra cost typically?? -maybe I misheard, but I think the allowance is included with what I would pay monthly, ie, I get the normal allowance of calls in my monthly spend aswell as this download( or is it a case of being charged, the extra as I go along, depending on how much I download??....which could make for a very expensive month:D )
And most importantly can I and how often can I view boards.ie within that megabyte:D
thatnks
mm

Rew

They are ok, like an Ipaq but not a good. A meg isn't a lot if your viewing streaming media but the speed is still 33K (i think) so i doubt you u will be streaming much to it. They seem to be trying to push "WAP over GPRS" with it for some reason. Id say mail is probs the mot usefull app for it at min.

Personaly id still go for a decent phone and PDA seperatly or one of these http://www.skeye.de/en/pad_sl.html which are great fun to play with (expensive atm though).

flywheel

sorry to take the shine of your brushed aluminum... 1MB isn't going to get you very far, even with a recommended PDA package (5Mb - 10Mb) you have to be careful what you are up to, keep an eagle eye on that GPRS data counter.

take a look at this thread for some recommended mobile links:
Do you GPRS too?

you need to stick to PDA friendly sites, the Pocket Internet Explorer is limited in what it can display and how it formats regular sites you would comfortably visit on the desktop. also on a regular (non PDA friendly) sites you'll be open to sucking down a lot of data. e.g. just surfing onto the boards.ie homepage that's already about 200Kb gone (with images on), (about 90Kb in the page and 110+Kb in images).

for streaming (unless someone else is paying the bill!) take it easy e.g. for the Ireland Live TV service that can stream via the RealOne player I just did a test with their news channel (at 18.8kbps) and 1MB got me about 6min 30sec.
http://www.irelandlivetelevision.tv/mobile/

Another hint is to set your e-mail account settings carefully, particularly what you take down (headers only, first X Kb of the mail, no attachments etc.)

If you get to hang on to the device, keep an eye out for a reasonably priced SD Flash Memory Card, the standard 32MB internal RAM isn't a lot, if you know anyone going to the USA or Asia ask them to look for you (you can almost half the cost of what you pay on the street here).

HTH,
Brian G

Thanks for that:)
Those links are usefull.
The Gismo hasn't arrived yet and this being Ireland...it will probably be next week now.
Though I've poped a mail off to o2 as I'm like a kid waiting on Santa here:p
mm