IBM WorkPad z50 Handheld

The IBM Workpad Z50 is finally coming down in price. Street prices at this time linger in the mid to low $300 range. A previous price of $799-$1000 prevented many people from seriously considering a Z50 as a companion. With the new pricing structure, however, this will soon change.

What sets the Z50 apart from other WinCE devices is the full laptop-style shell it is encased in. With a claimed 95% size keyboard of a world-renowned IBM Thinkpad keyboard, one can easily type away gracefully without the horrible mushy, small-keys that plagued earlier WinCE devices. Further establishing itself, the Z50 features a full 64000 color display, in contrast to the more limiting 256 color display the competition offers. The increased color resolution will be appreciated by those intending to use the Z50 for any type of image work.

In my use of the Z50, I was amazed at many of the features of the Z50. Being only 2.6 lbs, the Z50 can literally be carried anywhere you go. The instant-on capability makes using the Z50 a breeze by not having to wait several minutes for "boot up" as in traditional laptop designs. The onscreen 8" DualScan color is average in display quality and backlighting is sufficient enough even in the darkest areas. The built-in 33.6 modem is plenty fast for what the Z50 can manage during web browsing.

Battery life on the Z50 can be a bit tricky to track. First of all, using the backlight on the Z50 puts a drain on the battery, so the realistic lifespan with full backlighting on all the time is in the 6-7 hour range. Second, keep in mind that using the built-in modem puts an extra drain on the battery life. Although IBM claims an 8-hour uptime per charge, the real-time lifespan is around 3.5 hours with the modem in operation.

On the negative side, WinCE still profoundly lacks in a wide selection of available software titles. Most software titles I have seen are very limited and buggy. This fact alone may preclude one's desire to purchase any WinCE device so make you sure you know what software you will use before making a decision to go with WinCE.

I'm also disappointed with the quality of the software Microsoft has provided with WinCE. The "Pocket Office" suite they provide is nothing like the desktop-versions. They are so limited in operation it is basically useless for any serious work. Further stunting my enthusiasm, is Pocket IE not being updated frequently enough to be fully compatible with modern webpages, and it's color depth being limited to 256 colors.

The speed of the Z50 also leaves a lot to be desired. Granted, I am not familiar with previous WinCE machines so I am not sure how much "slower" they ran. However, the Z50 is roughly equivalent to a 486 machine as a method of comparison. Decent speed perfectly acceptable for mobile use, but certainly not "fast" in this modern age of 500MHz Pentiums.

Additionally accessories for the Z50 include a 32MB memory expansion for about $100 street price. This is well worth the money as WinCE can easily make use of the extra memory for both operation and storage. IBM also sells the MicroDrive (tm) CompactFlash Hard Disk which is fully compatible with the Z50 -- yes that's right, IBM has actually manufactured a hard disk into the tiny size of a compact flash card! The 300 some megabytes it offers may be overkill for most WinCE users, but it does give the user the option to expand. An available high capacity battery offers a claimed lifespan of 16 hours too. Of course, network cards, flash ram, and other accessories are all available in PCMCIA or FlashCard format to use with the Z50.

Overall, the Z50 is a nice machine for the street price it is selling for now. The full keyboard will allow one to do serious word processing or other similar type of work. Battery life is amazingly good for laptop standards. Web browsing is sufficient enough for mobile or travel use and the integrated modem only makes the whole package sweeter.