Opening the case we found the N30 to be a sleek little number much slimmer than the bulky X30 Dell and more than a match for the smaller Ipaq, the first difference you note is the lack of a navigation key, instead the Acer has a speaker mounted below the screen which provides a very good audio level which was great with our tomtom navigation software.

The Navigation button is far from a loss as we can never see the point of them anyway, after all you need very small fingers to be able to avoid hitting up and left at the same time, far better for PDA's to have a scroll wheel like many of the Sony products or perhaps an Ipod style click wheel.

The Acer N30 PDA measures 70 x 110 x 13mm and will add an extra 130 grams to your pocket which is pretty good for a fully featured PDA, especially one that manages to break the 4 hour barrier, only just but in our tests it managed MP3 replay for just over 4 hours from a single charge of the Li-ion battery.

Powered by a Samsung S3C2410 266 MHz processor and running windows mobile 2003 the N30 gives most PDA's a good run for their money, the 64mb of ram allows for storage of a fair few applications but its the SD slot that really carries the burden of storage.

Build quality was very good and far from what we expected of a lower end PDA, the use of black plastics and silver metallic is quote classy and feels well built and robust, not sure you'd want to drop one but it looks like it might survive. Survival of data during power loss is a nig issue for any hardened PDA user and the Acer N30 has a 1.8mb section of ROM in which you can storage vital data or configuration settings, plus the backup utility can be set to do auto backups at a preset battery level copying data to the SD card.

Of course the SD slot can be used for plug-in cards and this may be needed as the N30 does not have WiFi as standard, instead it uses Bluetooth for wireless connectivity which is fine for a mobile phone connection and even a handset but most users want wifi. Adding an SD wifi card is possible but we did find that it protrudes a long way above the top of the unit which leaves some concerns that it is vulnerable to damage.

All of the standard windows mobile applications are present and seem to work just fine on the Acer, the USB sync is pretty robust too albeit a USB 1.1 connection instead of the faster USB 2.0. A nice touch is the ability to charge the battery from the USB connection which will really appeal to those who travel a lot and don't want to take the bulky Acer charger with them.

All in all the £160 Acer N30 is a nice package, despite its lack of wifi it seems to do everything well, sure its not an Ipaq and the popular HP 1940 is still a compelling buy but if you want to be different the Acer and its side scroll wheel and loud speaker may be just what you are looking for.

More PDA's

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