HP iPAQ rx5915 Travel Companion

I travel by motorcycle, so space is at a premium! I'd been bringing my laptop on short trips, but ended up not using it as much as I thought I would. All I really needed was some way of finding hotel locations and phone numbers, plus some way to email or post photos when I had a wifi connection.

Before leaving on a Canadian 2 week adventure last August, we decided a GPS might be helpful. After searching for a month or so, I decided on the RX5915. I'm glad I did!

The iPaq paid for itself the first 2 nights we were on our trip - using Tom Tom to find hotels (and their phone numbers) in small towns, then calling ahead and securing the last hotel room in town!

Sure, any GPS can do that, but they're not small enough to carry around in your purse all the time, and they won't let you access the internet to Priceline a room for the following evening.

The iPaq gives me everything I need, nothing I don't.

The good:
Everything I need in one small package.
Tom Tom Navigation is so easy, even my husband can figure it out!
Large enough to see what's going on, small enough to fit anywhere.
No tiny useless keyboard to take up additional space.
Wireless, USB, and Bluetooth connections.
Accepts SD cards.
Works great as a photo viewer - take the card out of the camera, install in iPaq, and view everything on a larger screen.

The Bad:
GPS takes some time to connect, even after the upgrades (up to 10 minutes occasionally).
GPS kills the battery very quickly.
Tom Tom doesn't offer a way to print out maps or create maps offline.
Doesn't accept HD SD cards.

I bought this when my old iPaq died recently, and I'm very, very happy with this new one. The regular Windows Mobile apps are just as solid as ever, and while the new GPS has its quirks, overall I'm very happy with that too. Quirks: sometimes streets aren't named (though I was surprised by how many little dirt roads WERE named) and on two occasions, the unit showed me driving to the side of the road rather than on it.

Battery life is excellent and the buttons are well-placed. It's nice that HP has ditched their proprietary power port in favor of mini-USB, so any cable will connect to a PC. I would have preferred a different locale for the stylus, but I'm getting used to that.

If you're looking for a pretty good GPS that also doubles as a PDA, this will do the job nicely.

I really needed a PDA, and I liked the idea of having a GPS navigation system. I travel with my job and making a wrong turn or taking a detour no longer causes the stress that it used to cause. The PDA is compatible with Microsoft Outlook, which allows me to manage my address book on the computer or on the PDA. This was a great investment. I am very happy with it.

I usually do not write reviews very often, but I thought this may be helpful to others, I have owned two GPS devices which have the usual problems of losing signal under a bridge and take a long time to acquire satellites. The iPAQ rx5915 gets signal inside my house, even in my basement which makes it very easy to enter destinations ahead of time. It is very impressive. The only thing I wish it would have is text-to-speech but it is OK, it displays the name of streets to turn-to. 802.11b/g is awesome too, it took me 1 minute to connect to my wireless access point and getting into my GMAIL account.

This is a great product even if its been out for a few years now! It works well with Vista but I had to down load a few programs they walked me thru! Also had a problem with the "time" sync unit and Everything was off by 1 hour! Got a daylight savings time patch and now works great! Sync sometimes gets caught up but unplug and re-sync and all goes through. Overall I've had for a month and a half and find it a great tool. GPS sometimes puts me in a field off roading but I am used to being out there because I come from Northern Maine where we are neglected from time to time! People still think we use outhouses and some of us do! Thats back to the basics. Enjoy your product and try to learn all it can do!

Dean