First Impressions of the HandEra 330 Parts I-III

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Jun 19, 2006

This was originally published as a three part review from June 19, 2001 through July 5, 2001.

Perhaps first impression isn't the right title for this article because I've owned a 330 for over three weeks now. But it's traditional, and having consistent titles for device reviews makes them stick out in the article list.

Just to cover my first impressions, they ranged from "Wow!" to "I think I'm in love" to "The only way I'll ever let go of this is if they pry it out of my dead rotting hands"

Yep, I was impressed. Drooling might be more accurate. Over what? For starters, a 240x320 screen with a really bright, really blue backlight. Not one of those inverted pale green imitation backlights that barely suffice in complete darkness and help not a whit in partial darkness. No, an honest to goodness backlit screen with the (gasp) background pixels lit.

~~ short break from drooling for some actual technical information ~~

The HandEra 330 runs OS 3.5.2 on a 33MHz Dragonball VZ processor (also used in the Visor Edge and the Palm m50x devices). The device is 4.7 x 3.2 x 0.7 inches (121 x 81 x 17 mm) and weighs 5.9 ounces (167 grams) with batteries. The screen is 240x320 16 shade grayscale covering 2.2 x 2.9 inches (55 x 73 mm). It ships with 2MB of Flash ROM, all used by the OS, and 8MB of RAM. It has both Compact Flash and Secure Digital slots on the top of the device and uses the same HotSync port as the PalmPilot Personal, PalmPilot Professional, all Palm III* devices, and the TRGPro. It is powered by either 4 AAA batteries, an upcoming Lithium Ion battery pack, or an AC adaptor.

~~ back to your regularly scheduled drooling ~~

The screen features a soft grafitti area. By default, it looks just like the standard Palm screens. However, there is an arrow at the border of the alphabetic and numeric portions. When you tap the arrow, the graffiti area minimizes to a very small bar at the bottom of the screen. Applications optimized for the 330 are able to use this extra space however they wish.

A spiffy albeit not terribly useful side effect of the soft graffiti area is the ability to customize the calculator button with the icon of the mapped calculator application. This wins coolness points, if nothing else. You also get graffiti echo - an image of the actual strokes you make appears underneath them in the graffiti area. Having tried TealEcho in the past, I expected graffiti echo to really irritate me. It is much less intrusive than I expected, but I still find it distracting when I am taking notes. Graffiti echo cannot be turned off within the preferences - I sense a hack in the making.

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