Big review of Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 610 BT/WLAN

January 4, 2004 | Pavel Koza | format - Other (ar.) | viewed - 409x
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Big review of Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 610 BT/WLAN

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is not new to the PDA segment. Both Fujitsu and Siemens had launched several pocket-size computers individually before they joined their efforts to introduce a Pocket PC device called Pocket LOOX 600. It was not bad, but suffered from certain "teething problems", so to say. That is why I was eagerly awaiting its successor to see if Fujitsu Siemens Computers would be able to learn from its own mistakes. You will learn about the result from this article. Unfortunately, I had only three days to get acquainted with LOOX 610. Yet I think there are many more improvements than the number of the new version suggests. Let me also thank Fujitsu Siemens Computers Czech for providing the device for review purposes.

In fact, Pocket LOOX 610 comes in two versions. The basic version is Pocket LOOX 610 BT. The other, Pocket LOOX 610 BT/WLAN, has more RAM and integrated Wi-Fi support. I was able to test the latter.

What is in the box?

The device and all the accessories fit in a relatively small box with colour print and with several cardboard compartments inside. Here is what Fujitsu Siemens Computers thought users would need:

Pocket LOOX 610
Battery
Cradle
Synchronisation USB cable
AC adapter
Two power cables (with different plugs for the UK and Europe)
Case with a belt clip
Spare stylus
User guide
Warranty information and EULA
4 CDs

Although the device is the most tempting item to explore, we will leave it for a later time and take a look at the accessories first. The cradle comes in one piece, is made of plastic and although it is not particularly appealing, it is quite well designed - two rubber strips on the bottom and relatively big weight make it very stable. It can also accommodate a LOOX with bigger battery - all you need to do is to move a slider. The data cable (some 130 cm long) is detachable and can be connected directly to the device, which is a highly convenient solution.

The AC adapter comes in two parts. The European version comes with two cables with different plugs (one for the Continent, one for the UK). You can recharge LOOX either in the cradle or directly. Unlike some other devices, LOOX does not need a special adapter for direct charging - there is a connector for the power cable on the side of the device.

It is advisable to start using a protective case immediately if you want to spare your device from scratches and bruises. The manufacturer supplies one. It is black, made of fabric, nice to touch. The upper flip with a Velcro fastener protects the device against slipping off accidentally. The flip has a small pocket, again with Velcro, that can hold a memory card, for example. On the back, there is a round bit that fits in the belt-clip. It is made of plastic and does not look very trustworthy, even though it is tougher than it seems. The main disadvantage - or the downside of increased safety - is bigger size. You can definitely forget about putting the case with LOOX inside in the pocket of your shirt.

The spare stylus is the same as the original one. It is not easy to find it in the box - it is attached underneath one of the compartments. It is slim, combining light metal and plastic.

The user manual - or rather a quick-start guide - provides very basic information about the device (hardware description and how to make it operational). On the first page wrongly informs users in five languages that the pre-installed system is Microsoft Windows for Pocket PC 2002 (no bonuses for the proof-reader this time:) There are no further problems on the remaining 11 pages of the brochure (you can find detailed information on one of the accompanying CD-ROMs, including in Czech). The package also contains a leaflet with warranty information and one with advice on how to use the device ergonomically. Both of them are larger than the user manual, which unfortunately, has become a rule in most electronic appliances...

And finally, I should mention four CD-ROMs with useful applications - both standard and bonus ones. Two of the CDs ship with the device regardless of the market, while the two others are Czech-specific. We will deal with them in detail in the Software chapter. This is all you get in the package. Should you find it insufficient, there is a plenty of optional accessories available.

Design

The new LOOX is made of plastic but silver colour gives it a metallic look. Although I like this Pocket PC more than its predecessor, LOOX 600, it still lacks something one would call "sex-appeal". On the other hand, such a device is more of a work tool than fashionable accessory - and this PDA offers much more utility than beauty. The dimensions of 78 x 147 x 19 millimetres (3.07 x 5.81 x 0.72 inches) make LOOX 610 one of the larger Pocket PCs currently on the market; the weight is some 205 grams (7.23 ounces).

There are no surprises on the front panel. The display is somewhat smaller than you would expect, given the size of the device, but the designers cleverly dealt with it by placing a dark frame around the display. Over the display, there is the main switch and two LED indicators. The one on the left is blue and indicates Bluetooth activity, the other is green and notifies of various special events. Under the display, there is a traditional set of four soft buttons and a four-directional controller. However, two things are different from usual. Unlike in other devices, you can assign two functions ton one button (short and long press), and one of the buttons is pre-configured to launch FSC Connect2Air (you can re-define the button, of course). If you are used to carrying a PDA in your pocket and often switch it on accidentally, you can deactivate the applications buttons in the suspend mode. I liked the controller very much - it is fine and sensitive and helped me to some best scores in my favourite games:) The last interesting spot is the speaker in the shape of a six-pointed star, located to the left of the controller.

There is nothing exciting on the back but for the replaceable battery which is secured in place with a small switch, and a hard reset switch which is located under the battery.

As far as the number of controls is concerned, the left side hosts the biggest number of them. Besides a soft reset and the IrDA eye, there are also three function buttons. The top button activates a special menu (the so-called "fast access button"), the other two are used to scroll the menu, and the top one confirms selection. I found this system with two independent buttons slightly less convenient than a scrolling wheel, but it is my subjective perception, other users may have a completely different experience.

The top is equally interesting. There you can find the usual 3.5 mm stereo audio jack, as well as both expansion slots - SD/MMC and Compact Flash type I/II. While you can release the SD card by slightly pushing it in, there is a special button to eject the CF card. On the right edge, there is a small Wi-Fi antenna and the stylus shaft.

The right hand side is rather dull, with just the connector for charging. The bottom side hosts a data connector as well as a microphone.

Pocket PC	Dimensions (in. / mm)	Weight (oz / g)
Acer n10	3.07 x 5.12 x 0.67 78 x 130 x 16.9	5.93 168
Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 610BT/WF	3.07 x 5.81 x 0.72 78 x 147.5 x 18.2	6.95 205
HP iPAQ h1940	2.75 x 4.46 x 0.5 69.8 x 113.3 x 12.8	4.38 124
HP iPAQ h2210	3.01 x 4.54 x 0.61 76.4 x 115.4 x 15.4	5.09 144
HP iPAQ h4150	2.78 x 4.47 x 0.53 70.6 x 113.6 x 13.5	4.66 132
Toshiba e310	3.1 x 4.9 x 0.4 80 x 125 x 12.4	4.9 140
Toshiba e740	3.1 x 4.9 x 0.6 80 x 125 x 15.2	6.1 179
MDA II	2.75 x 5.12 x 0.71 70 x 130 x 19	6.53 185

Parameters

The technical parameters are mostly a very pleasant reading, indeed. The LOOX is powered by an Intel PXA255 XScale processor. There is no need to introduce it - it has been used in Pocket PC devices for quite some time now. If you envy users of devices with a newer Intel PXA263 processor, calm down - its clock speed and performance are the same as those of the processor used in LOOX. Power users will surely appreciate the possibility to change the clock speed using a software utility. There are three modes: Turbo, Standard and a power saving mode. For the first two, you can activate auto-regulation, which can save some battery power. Changes take place immediately without restart. I used the power-saving mode most of the time without any performance problems. I could replay MP3's in the background, watch video and play resources-intensive games. If you combine this mode with reduced backlight, you can substantial increase the time on battery. LOOX has a big operating memory - the version I was able to review had 128 MB of RAM. Although you can use only around 119 MB, few will find it insufficient. The operating system is stored in a 64 MB flash ROM, 28 MB out of which is used as a safe storage called simply LOOXstore. If you save sensitive data there, you will not need to worry even in case the battery runs completely dry.

The display is of standard quality yet there has been a major leap forward compared to the previous model of LOOX. I think it is exactly the same display as that used in iPAQ h4150, for example - a transflexive TFT display with LED backlight. If you have read my review of the iPAQ, you may remember that there is one glitch - the backlight has a yellowish tint. It is not very strong in either LOOX or h4150, but it stands out when you compare the display with h2210, whose display is snow white. It is not much apparent from the photo but at least you can see that the brightness of the display used in LOOX compares to the traditionally excellent iPAQs. The resolution of 240 by 320 pixels and 65 thousand colours is a matter-of-course. What is somewhat unusual is the presence of two icons for display in the Settings. One invokes an applet for automatic toggle of the backlight. The other makes it possible to adjust the brightness at eight levels separately for battery and mains operation. LOOX does not have the automatic backlight adjustment feature but you can conveniently change the level by pressing the fast access button and then cursor right or left. If you'd like to play with more settings, you can activate the ClearType technology using a standard applet. You will surely like the sensitivity, accuracy and fast responses of the touch-sensitive layer.

LOOX deserves big praise for its excellent audio features. It ranks among those Pocket PC devices that can replace common MP3 players without any limitations. There are two applets - one for setting the volume of the loudspeaker and headphones, the other for setting the sensitivity and volume of microphone. Besides the volume level (adjustable on a much finer scale than the usual six levels), you can change the balance of the right and left channels as well as to adjust bass and treble at four levels. The headphones connector is a standard 3.5 mm stereo jack, which means you can choose any headphones to your liking. I used the top-quality Koss Porta Pro headphones and was surprised to hear no disturbing noise. Listening to music is therefore a great experience. The built-in speaker is rather worse (like in all PDAs). It has problems with playing back lively tunes with maximum bass boost. It is not criticism, it is a statement of a fact because the built-in loudspeaker is not meant as a working tool for DJ's:) Speaking about audio features, we must not omit sound recording capabilities that are at a very high level, also due to one of the applets. My favourite test - recording voice from a two-metre distance - gave excellent results. LOOX has no special key to start recording but you can assign it to any of the buttons, because each can be used for two different actions. In other words, if you have a dictaphone and buy a LOOX 610, the former will soon be catching dust on the shelf.

As far as communication options are concerned, this device must satisfy everyone. The main connectivity is over fast USB. The cable easily connects both to the cradle and directly to the device. If you cannot use the USB for some reason, you can buy an optional serial cable that can be used with the cradle, too. I was nicely surprised when testing the infra port, which allows not only for the standard 115.2 kbps but also 4 Mbit/sec. Although I did not reach the full 4 megabits, data transfer from a laptop over the infra port was faster than USB! My laptop is rather outdated and does not have USB 2.0, but still the speed of 164 KB per second is a good result. Concretely, transfer of a 1MB file to the PDA over FIR took six seconds. The opposite direction is a little slower - when copying to the notebook, FIR was "only" tree times faster than SIR (less than 14 KB per second), but you rarely copy large files this way (provided you do not use a Pocket PC as a portable data storage for desktop PCs).

But that's not all. Depending on the version, LOOX comes either with a combination of BT and WLAN, or just with BT. There are no hardware switch for either of the wireless transceivers but they are activated/deactivated using a software utility called FSC Connect2Air, which is associated with one of the four soft buttons by default. LOOX cannot work with BT and Wi-Fi simultaneously - when you try to activate both, the transceiver you activated first will switch off. Although you could think of a situation when this would be limiting, 99 % of users will hardly notice.

Let's examine Bluetooth first, because it is integrated in both versions of LOOX 610. If I say right at the beginning that all is done using Pocket Plugfree, many a user of the previous LOOX model might start to worry: although I never owned a LOOX, I have read in many discussions and heard from many users that the functionality of Pocket Plugfree in LOOX 600 was far, far from perfect. Good news: there has bee a dramatic improvement. Although I find Bluetooth Manager from Widcomm in newer iPAQs user-friendlier, Pocket Plugfree is fully functional and that counts. I tried BT communication between the PDA and a mobile phone, GPS and USB BT adapter for laptop, respectively, and everything worked fine (but as I have said, I did not have enough time for thorough, in-depth testing). I disliked two things, however trivial they may be. BT takes quite a long time to activate (first, FSC Connect2Air initialises the hardware and then it takes a while for Plugfree to start) and it will not return to the active status after a reset. The Wi-Fi functionality is problem-free, too. Working with it is excellent because it uses system services. If you have a well-configured WLAN network, connecting is a matter of a few seconds. The only criticism does not concern the functionality but design. If it was impossible to integrate the antenna in the large body of the device, it could have been of the same colour. A good designer painfully needed there...

There is only one area that we have not dealt with - power. Judging from the size, the Lithium-Ion battery must last for half a year:) It is huge, so the capacity of 1500 mAh is hardly surprising. According to official documentation it should be able to power the device for 12 hours (depending on services used and backlight intensity). A fully charged battery should keep the device in the stand-by mode for almost two weeks. I tried a complete discharge only once, with full backlight on and maximum processor speed. LOOX switched off after five hours and twenty-seven minutes, which is an excellent result. I am not including a chart this time, because it is not very clear. LOOX can only indicate the battery status in 10-percent steps and the numeric result of the test seemed strange in general. In any case, if you use low backlight and activate BT and WLAN only when you really need to, you do not be afraid of running out of steam throughout the day. If you need more energy, you can buy either a spare battery (replacing the main battery is very easy and safe owing to the backup battery, you can immediately continue where you interrupted your work) or an extra large battery to use instead of the original one.

Expandability

LOOX offers excellent expandability. I will mention relevant features only briefly because they are the same as in other similarly equipped devices. The CompactFlash slot can accommodate both Type I and Type II CF cards: IBM Microdrive, a GPS card, any 10/100 Mbit LAN - anything you choose to suit your needs and budget. The SD slot serves only for memory cards, which is no problem given the presence of the CF slot. The data connector on the bottom side makes it possible to use a foldable keyboard. You can connect other accessories via Bluetooth. LOOX in combination with a BT-enabled GPS will create a powerful navigation system in a second.

And finally, some good news for users of the older LOOX 600 whose device broke down, got lost or something and they were left with cables, keyboard etc. The manufacturer says the data connectors in both models are fully compatible, so all accessories that worked with LOOX 600 will work with LOOX 610 without any problems. In some cases though, you need to download new drivers from www.pocket-loox-www.com.

Software

Like most other new Pocket PCs, this LOOX offers the largest software package (aside of the specific edition for devices with a GSM/GPRS module) with Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Premium edition, as well as many useful bonus applications. Some of them are in the form of applets in Settings (such as System Info, Audio and processor speed adjustment), while others come as standalone applications.

FSCSpeedMenu together with an action button and two scroll buttons makes a strong combination for controlling LOOX easily with one hand. When you get used to it, your work will speed up significantly. FSC Backup is an average utility for backing up and restoring data and the system. You can backup everything or select only some parts of the contents of the memory. The data can be backed up to any memory card or LOOXstore, and protected with password. FSC Panning is a somewhat secret utility which simply pans active window, e.g. in Pocket IE when the contents is too large to fit in the window. Unfortunately, I could not test it because I only learned about its existence afterwards. Autorun is a utility which does exactly what you would expect it to do - it runs programs located in the root directory of a memory card.

LOOX ships with two CD-ROMs. One of them contains only a few basic applications from Microsoft (MS Outlook, MS ActiveSync, Windows Media Player...); the other offers documentation for LOOX and available accessories, as well as a few applications. BSQUARE Java Virtual Machine will make it possible to run JAVA applications or view JAVA web pages directly on your Pocket PC. Message Master Mobile Client is an application for communications over SMS, GPRS and soon for MMS. F-Secure FileCrypto for Pocket PC Personal Edition offers encryption of data in your Pocket PC - if your device gets into the wrong hands, your data are still protected with a password. Nyditot Virtual Display extends the display resolution of your LOOX to more than the standard 240 x 320 pixels. However, you can see only part of the expanded image (240 x 320 pixels). That is why it is Virtual:) There is perhaps no need to introduce Pocket Informant - it is a complex replacement of all pre-installed PIM applications. Space2go Organizer offers mobile access to both personal and corporate data. Easy2Connect is a utility for easy configuration of Internet access. With WESTTEK(r) ClearVue(tm) Office for Pocket LOOX, you can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in their native format without any conversion. MovianVPN(tm) for Windows Mobile offers a safe VPN connection to your local network. And finally, there are two demos: you try printing with JETCET Print Pocket for 15 days, and have some fun with the game GoKart Racing World.

Pricing

The final evaluation is impossible without knowing the price tag. The basic version of LOOX 610 costs 580 USD, the model with integrated Wi-Fi and larger memory costs approximately 660 USD. It is up to you to judge if it is dear or cheap. I suppose it is a fair price.

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Benchmarks

I use Spb Benchmark for a complete performance test. Having reviewed several new Pocket PCs, I will compare them. If you are interested in the detailed results, the complete .XML file is available for download here: FSC Pocket LOOX 610 (2003, 400 MHz) [1KB]. If you copy the contents of the file to the form on this page (click on Add device), you can compare the results with other devices.