My 720 !!! experience, a beginning

After wondering for months what a 720 would be like compared to my 6651 I can finally say I will know soon.

I have a friends 720 who borrowed a 6651 from me for her vacation for GPS purposes. Said friend has crappy eyes and wanted something bigger to see while driving.

We easily transferred all her PIM info to my 6651. I loaded her 1gb CF card with all the maps she would need for the trip. I gave her a mini tutorial about the 6651, focusing on restoring it if she had problems.

Her first words at the 6651 TFT screen were "ohmygod, it's so bright and big." I also loaned her my mobile bracket so the 6651 can remain in tablet mode in the car, thanks to Calligrapher.

I learned as she was heading out the door her daughter has a 40gb jukebox. Aha! So I loaned her a passive USB hub. She can connect her digicam and download her photos via the 6651 to the jukebox, instead of buying extra SM cards.

So I've backed up her 720 (took a long time, like 6 minutes, about 12mb of RAM used, is this normal?) with the hp backup program.

My first impression is the 720 is exactly like my 690 in terms of the keybaord and screen, both of which are OK, but don't thrill me. Boot time and general responsiveness seem a bit slower than my 6651.

So I've just hard reset her 720 and tomorrow I begin to rebuild it to my liking. I have two weeks to play with her 720 before she returns. I can either finally stop my envy or decide to buy a 720.

Stay tuned. I'll probably need help from time to time.

LOL, i surely will help you if you have any questions!

first thing.. turn the darn animation off in registry. do you already know how do to it? (if not i'll tell you) it will seem much faster afterwards
it has always been fast enough for me (i'm using a 728 but it can't be much of a difference), for example the 900/900C couldn't impress me in terms of GUI speed because of that. (but it did impress me with other things of course! )

yes, hp backup is slow in backing up. but what matters: it is very fast with restoring!

if you need the small size, you're going to like the 720
if not, then you'll prefer the intermec

My progress so far. Everything is subjective, seat of the pants testing. I only timed the network stuff.

Multimedia:
I wanted to get the multimedia stuff out of the way first. So I installed tcpmp and gsplayer.
Gsplayer is better on the 720 than my 6651. It bogs down less. I can switch to other tasks quicker and generally keep working. I can stil multi-task on my 6651 when gsplayer is running but the 720 has the edge. I have some music I love to carry with me, so the 720 wins this test. But, remember I have a 20gb jukebox that goes with me everywhere so any handheld I own is only a backup mp3 player.

Tcpmp is a whole different story. Let's forget the screen technologies. There's no comparing DSTN to TFT. With that out of the way, here's my findings. My 6651 edges out the 720, either streaming from the network or playing local files. I fiddled with all the settings and a variety of media resolutions and framerates. My 6651 always had a smoother image, IMO, and was more responsive when task switching or fast forward rewind whatever. However, I'm not into videos much, so the 720 loses a test that is unimportant.

Network performance:
I used the same Dlink 660 and prism ref drivers in both machines for consistency with 128 bit wep.
My 6651 r/w to my server at a consistent 200Kb/sec. My 6651 downloads from a fast site at a consistent 140Kb/sec. The 720 r/w to my server at a consistent 240Kb/sec. The 720 downloads from a fast site at 180Kb/sec. These figures are based on 20Mb or larger files.

There's no doubt the 720 is faster across the network, I expected that. I do transfer a fair bit over the network so in the long run I would save time using the 720. But, unless I'm moving really big files I'm not likely to notice much difference on a daily basis.

However, when I r/w many small files there's no discernable difference. The 720 is a couple seconds faster, but sometimes a couple seconds slower.

I tried a wired ethernet card and without exception, both machines moved files about 15% faster because there's no overhead of WEP.

Todays conclusion: For multimedia and network performance either platform is acceptable for me.

Tomorrow. I add the ppc package to the 720 specifically for NF3. I plan to duplicate the setup used on my 6651. I have a single copy of the stub dlls on my CF with a systempath in the registry. It has worked fine and there's no redundant dlls taking up space. Once all is prepared I'll be comparing browsing performance with NF3 and ftxbrowser. I expect my 6651 to be slower simply because the 6651 has a bigger screen to fill initially.

about multimedia: no point in comparing the videos subjectively by the screen. do a benchmark and see which one will drop more frames, etc. others said (on ppcmag) that the 720 is much better at that...

browsing: it shouldn't matter much if the display is larger.. but if the intermec is really slower then that will be because of the CPU.

I really wish I could edit this post a day later.

Anyway, music and video are two subjective things to me. If it looks or sounds smooth then I'm happy, and all the benchmarks in the world won't affect my decision. Benchmarks are objective and a fast ghostly flickering screen according to a benchmark isn't my cup of tea

But as I said, video and music are low on my list, not likely to see much use. Tomorrow will tell a different tale.

i meant there's no point in comparing a DSTN and TFT screen for video...
you see why.

i'm curious about the results for browsing..
i think there'll not be much difference, maybe some seconds (in favour of the 720) - or if not, then that's because IE/netfront has to render the pages for 640 pixels in width. or maybe not as it (IE) doesn't really care about that! netfront does though.

anyway the whole comparing thing is interesting and i'm looking forward to the following tests ... but what decides in the end is the size factor!

Edited by cmonex 2005-08-15 9:34 PM

How do you turn off the animation in the registry. Would be interested to see if it speeds things up.

Cheers
Scotty

Its quite simple, you download Tillanosoft SmallTweak and install it. After you reset your machine, go into Control Panel and click on SmallTweak. On the first page, it'll give you the option to turn off the windows animation.

Next to nothing is lost John. It speeds up the gui a fair bit without the screens animated opening and closing. The animation is needless fluff imo.

it is so needless that i never noticed that i had socalled animation until someone told me to disable it. hpc is indeed faster without it