So there I was, a happy person with both a wireless phone and a trusty handheld, my iPaq h4355. I got sucked into the idea of a converged device at CTIA in New Orleans, though, when I had a chance to play with a PPC-6600. It had an integrated keyboard, bluetooth, and I figured I wouldn’t miss the WiFi once I was on the web through Sprint. So I put the phone and iPaq up on eBay, and took the plunge.

Overall, I was very happy with the PPC-6600. It had a few quirks, which I’ll get into further down in this review, but overall it was a decent handheld. It served as a pretty good phone, too. The onboard keyboard worked as advertised, though it was a bit less usable than the keyboard on my iPaq. The screen was bright and clear. It was fairly quick, if noticeably slower than other handhelds I’ve used.

Voice quality was excellent with the handheld itself, and fair through a variety of bluetooth headsets. Reception was fair, but nowhere as good as the simple little Nokia phone I was using before, nor was it as good as the LG PM-325 I’m using now. I was able to make calls throughout the same area as these other phones, but they were more prone to signal fade or outright loss of signal. The internet connection was also a little spotty at the fringes of the network.

One gripe I had was that the PPC-6600 only comes with Windows Media Player 9, which wouldn’t really work with the Windows Media Center files I had on my system. Luckily, there are hacks on the internet to upgrade this, since it seems Audiovox and Sprint are not going to provide an update themselves. Once updated, it worked perfectly, synchronizing my TV shows with no difficulty at all.

Internet use is a great app for a handheld, but a lot of the things I might want a handheld online for are out of reach with the slow 1xRTT connection Sprint provides. It did work for email and instant messaging, and for checking an address here and there. Using Google Maps or other sites with too many images proved to be more hassle than I cared for, though.

The camera works well, as far as phone cameras go, but Sprint’s picture mail service was not very well implemented. After a few tries, I gave up on sending picture and video mail all together. This was disappointing since it’s such a simple thing to do on most phones and I’d gotten used to firing off quick images to people.

Bluetooth GPS was great for my uses. When I was traveling in new cities, it was great to be able to navigate without a lot of hassle. Pairing with my little Holux GR-231 was completely painless. I used Pocket Streets, DeLorme Street Atlas 2005 Handheld, and Mapopolis. All worked well on this handheld, but only Mapopolis had decent redraw times. The others updated a little slowly. On other handhelds, this wasn’t a noticeable problem. The PPC-6600 even went with me on a gruelling climb (for geeks like me, anyway) to the summit of Notch Peak, which rises about 4500 feet nearly vertically above the Tule Valley in the remote Great Basin desert. It kept us on course after the trail faded an we started the final climb to the peak.

The biggest strike against the PPC-6600 was its poor battery life. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it made me think about power a lot more than the iPaq did. I had to become obsessive about charging it; I had a charger in my car, at my desk at work, and even kept a battery-powered USB charger in my backpack, just in case. Paranoid? Maybe, but I was just never confident I would have enough power to make a call if I needed to. As the battery settled in, it seemed to hold a charge longer, and I was able to go a full work day without needing a recharge. An extended battery purchased on eBay helped, too.

While the PPC-6600 is probably near the top as far as converged devices go, it’s neither a great phone nor a great handheld. I found myself missing the outright reliability the better signal and battery life of my old Nokia gave me. I also missed how easily the Nokia fit in my pocket so I could keep the phone silent and still not miss calls. Countless times I would hear complaints that I was harder to contact than when I had the previous phone, almost all due to the simple fact that the phone would be in my bag on silent mode rather than in my pocket. I couldn’t feel a vibration, so I missed the call. This may not be a big deal to others, but it became one for me.

I also missed the iPaq’s better keyboard, better battery, and faster processor. Not only that, but I started to wonder whether the kind of money I’d spent on the PPc-6600 justified the performance I was getting out of it.

In the end, I wound up putting my PPC-6600 on eBay. I had it for about 7 months, and I never hated it. I got decent mileage, I think, but I felt I wasn’t getting the whole experience I wanted.

I replaced the PPC-6600 with two new devices, so I’m back to phone and handheld mode. I wound up with an LG PM-325 (which is an excellent phone, in spite of my reason for purchasing it being that it’s the only Sprint phone with bluetooth as of now) and a Dell Axim x51v. The Axim has integrated WiFi, bluetooth, and a marvellous VGA screen. 256mb of flash ROM with 128mb of RAM is nothing to sneeze at either. It also runs Windows Mobile 5 with all the advantages that update has, including WMP10 and a better internet experience. Last, but certainly not least, it’s about $400 instead of $629.

The Axim works beautifully with the Dial-up Networking profile on the LG PM-325. In fact, the experience is almost no different from going online with the PPC-6600. I just hit the icon for Internet Explorer, and after a few seconds, I’m connected and online. Yeah, I have two devices now, but they’re two devices much better suited to the tasks I use them for.

To wrap things up, while I was converged for a few months, it just didn’t feel like what I needed. I hope this review sheds some light on what to expect if you’re looking at this phone.