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There
are issues, but do yourself a favor and pick one up.
This
is a well needed addition for any PDA in general
that supports the Type II Compact Flash Form Factor,
or has an available PCMCIA Slot.
IBM
has included the PCMCIA Adapter, critical for
devices such as Laptops and the Jornada 720 Handheld
PC. I have used this drive in my laptop, my
digital camera, my iPAQ and my Jornada 720.
While
the power consumption is arguable, the performace is
questionable. No doubt this is one hell of a
drive, and I hope to see the storage sizes increase
thie year. I do however, have a problem with
the lag. Most contributing to the lag, is the
spinning down of the drives after data access.
Applications
that are stored on the drive are 'hesitant' to load.
Mp3's sometimes stop playing or skip (this could
also be due to Media Player) while being
accessed/played.. Pocket PC and H/PC 2000
systems both experience problems accessing
applications from time to time that are stored on
the Microdrive after a soft reset.
 This
drive is best geared towards those storing and
accessing larger databases, ebooks, tech
doc's, etc. I don't recommend this drive for
Mp3 playback, as I have experienced problems every
single time during playback (on both the iPAQ and
Jornada 720). This drive is also excellent for
storing large photo collections, surpassed by none.
One
final issue I did notice, is that you cannot install
(or at least in my experience) an application such
as AvantGO to the Microdrive. It causes all
sorts of chaos when you bring your system back up,
and initially sync (this applies to both the iPAQ
and Jornada 720)
- UPDATE
10.2.01
- One
problem that can get very annoying, is when
inserting and removing the Micro Drive from
within the Jornada 720, and the Storage Card
name change. This happens sometimes when
you have the Micro Drive in use with a Compact
Flash Card simultaneously in the 720. If
you have a CF Card in the slot of the 720, and
you insert the Microdrive into the PCMCIA Slot,
many times the system will assign new names to
the cards. This causes a problem if say for
example you have a dozen applications installed
on the CF Card, and it was labeled /Storage
Card. When you try to access the
application, but the system has changed the name
to /Storage Card1, you'll suffer through some
application shortcut target editing when it
cannot find the app in question.
I have
seen this posted in many groups and on many boards,
and I myself have experienced the problem 3
different times. It's not fun, nor productive.
This would be my major complaint with the
product. However who is to blame?
HP, Microsoft or IBM? Highly I doubt this is
IBM's fault, but you have to consider it a
compatibility issue anyway.
Big
Ballah Baby Bean Rating:  (4
out of a possible 5 Beans)
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