But of course I pulled rank and so the iMate spent a week as the mate of LP, first some nuts and bolts info. The device is built around a Intel XScale PXA263 processor running at 400 MHz with Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition for Pocket PC. It has 128mb of RAM and 64mb of ROM all of which places it at the mid to high end of the PDA scale.

The first impression of the iMate is that it is one attractive PDA, possibly a little fatter than your average Ipaq but very similar in look and feel. Quality seems good and in its collapsed state its obviously bigger than your average mobile phone but its ok to talk into and use as a phone.

The phone credentials of the PDA2K are very good, it is a quad band device with full GPRS support allowing both voice and data communications, in pure phone mode you can expect some 5 hours of talk time or 168 hours of standby. Signal performance is good and certainly as good as our Sony Ericsson P800 and better than the Moto V600 Flip. Audio quality is superb mostly due to the need to use a good speaker for the PDA functions, you do have to be careful not to put your finger over the microphone hole on the bottom of the PDA2K its easy to do!

The power for the iMate PDA2K is provided by a 1490 mAh lithium polymer replaceable battery, in tests it managed to play a looped MP3 without backlight on for 12 hours and managed full MP3 replay with maximum backlight for a little over 5 hours, only use of the WiFi functions seriously dent the batteries performance.

And WiFi is the iMate PDA2K's trump card, the inclusion of 802.11b wifi support administered through the wireless connection manager really makes the iMate a proper business and gadgeteers tool, it is easily connected to networks even those with WPA or WEP encryption, it has a good range and seemed very reliable when joined to the Lordpercy.com network. A cool feature of this wifi connection is the ability to use the internet to make IP phone calls using software loaded onto the PDA2K and there is even use in being able to run MSN messenger across the 802.11b connection.

iMate have also included Bluetooth mainly to allow for connection of BT headsets and other Bluetooth peripherals, however the Bluetooth stack used here is not the best, even with the first patch released loaded onto the device we had issues with a HS820 headset dropping the connection (pairing) when the device goes into sleep mode. This is due to be fixed and doesn't make the PDA2K any worse than our Moto V600 but it is a shortcoming at present.

Using the iMate PDA2K as a full PDA is a pleasurable experience, this is due in no small part to the full Qwerty keyboard, no need to reach for the stylus and tap away like a lunatic on the screen or to use your fingernails to operate a small "thumb-board" like on the Sony P900 series the slide away keyboard is simply stunning. When its stowed away you'd have trouble knowing its there, but release the keyboard and the backlit keys slide into view giving a certain wow factor to the device and making typing emails very possible, perhaps even short documents.

The operating system works well on the iMate and the cut down windows OS / Pocket PC seems to run smoothly enough, there are a whole host of bundled applications for email / fax/ word and browsing, of course the 240 x 320 64k colour screen makes using the device easier and it does seem to have a remarkably bright backlight. Tucked away on the rear of the device is a VGA camera, we were disappointed that this had not been upgraded to over 1 mega pixel on this model so its of little use other than for a quick snapshot to include in an MMS message.

Storage can be further augmented by use of the SD slot which is nestled in the top edge of the iMate PDA2K alongside the headphone jack, the IR port has been moved to the left handside of the iMate. The SD slot is also SIDO compatible and could run a range of accessories but of course most of the useful SIDO card features are already on the PDA2K.

The iMate PDA2K smartphone is a device for those that need to be connected all the time, someone who is often on email, MSN or ICQ, the mobile and sending text messages at the same time, if you need a tool to act as a PDA but also as a communications centre this has to be the one. Its not a major leap from the last  iMate, but full wifi, improved battery life and screen brightness make this even more worthy than its predecessor at £545 its a lot of money but you get every pennies worth.

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