Hewlett Packard IPAQ h5450 Pocket PC

Background:
I have had a Palm Vx, iPAQ 3635, and worked with friends who had a Palm IIIc and Palm III. I once was a big palm advocate (and still am for a low price basic pda) but when a friend of mine got an iPAQ 3635, I had to have one and it really is better than the palm in ease of use, learning curve, options, and compatibility now. I changed jobs and lost my iPAQ 3635 so I had to buy a new one and waited for the 5450 to come out and bought it as soon as I could.

Basics:
It basically is the same as the other iPAQ's in use since it has the same Pocket PC 2002 Operating System. It also has the same basic shape, with different connectors, button placements, etc. The antenna sticking out of the top will make some tight fitting cases not work for it, but it is not obtrusive at all. The standard flip screen protector is nice that all most of the newer iPAQ's come with.

Screen:
The display is bright and the colors are great. Can't complain.

WiFi:
The WiFi interface works excellent and has a little signal strength bar on the today screen and is easy to turn on and off to save battery power. I haven't had any problems except that sometimes if I have had a lot of programs open, it will ask me to reset the device to turn on the WiFi because there is not enough memory. A little inconvenient, but not near as much as having to carry a compact flash sleeve and a wireless card around all the time.

Bluetooth:
I was really surprised to see how strong Bluetooth's signal was. I bought a USB Bluetooth adapter for my laptop and it works great. I can get close to 100ft away from the laptop before it looses connection. And it supports all of Bluetooth's protocols like active sync, wireless web, wireless messaging, wireless business card exchange, etc.

Fingerprint Recognition:
I have not had much luck with this yet, but I rarely do with this kind of technology. Maybe I just do it to fast. It has a training exercise where you must successfully scan in your finger 6 our of 8 times in a row. The most I have ever gotten was 5. I am not impressed but I think it could work if you took the time to work with it.

Power:
The batter life is good, several days with average (maybe above average) use. You no longer can plug the power adapter straight into the iPAQ like older versions, but it can charge over USB in a slow or fast mode which is helpful.

Speed:
The 400Mhz processor is not noticeably faster than my other 200Mhz strongarm was in my other iPAQ. Of course it is supposed to run slower to save battery power and scale up as it needs speed. I did run a graphical game and it was smoother so it did scale to meet the task. When I first started the iPAQ it was very delayed. I contemplated sending it back it was so much slower than my other iPAQ was. But after several minutes of use, it went away. Two other times this has happened. I assume there is something running in the background that is specific to this iPAQ (Wireless/Bluetooth) or some kind of flaw with the new processors. It was annoying the first time I used it, but since it has only happened a few other times, it is not annoying enough to say it is a bad product.