Before smartphones were quite so, well, smart, there was the PDA.  The Personal Digital Assistant, often mocked as a digital filofax, was the most pocketable of mobile computing platforms before the advent of Smartphones.

Many top manufacturers had their own range.  While HP expanded the Jornada brand, Dell’s range was called the Axim.  The Axim began life as the X5 model in 2002, which they followed up with the X3 in 2003, the X30 and X50 in 2004, and finally the X51 in 2005.

My Axim X30, still working in 2014

I bought the Axim X30, stretching my budget to the “high end” model of the time.  A 624MHz processor might not seem like much in these days of multi-core GHz tablets, but it was top of the range at the time.  This was the first Axim model to run the new and improved Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition OS, which originally evolved from Microsoft’s Windows CE.

It came supplied with “pocket” versions of Office programs (we’d call them “apps” today) but, as I acknowledged in my previous review of my HP Jornada 720, “Pocket Word” left a lot to be desired when it came to novel-writing and documents.  Thanks again to the innovative work by the people at Softmaker, the Axim X30 was one of many similarly featured PDAs that would run Softmaker Office 2008 for Pocket PC (Pocket PC was the forerunner to Windows Mobile 2003).

My Dell Axim X30 still works fine today, seen in the photo running Textmaker 2008 for Pocket PC.

These small PDAs had on-screen pop-up keyboards, not too dissimilar to the ones on your smartphone/tablet, but with PDA screens being so small and cramped (typically only 3″), and the touchscreen being the old resistive type, you couldn’t really get an awful lot of novel-writing done by jabbing away on the screen with the stylus.  It does run a form of handwriting recognition but even that doesn’t lend itself to the natural flow that you need when the muse grabs you.

Dell Axim X30 with Dell Keyboard

To help enormously, Dell released a foldable keyboard for their Axims.  They keyboard would fold away to a size barely any larger than the PDA itself, making this a fully portable solution.  When unfolded, the keyboard is very nearly full-size (certainly when compared to some of today’s more portable laptop devices).

The battery life of the X30 wasn’t super-long (3-3.5hrs), at least not when compared with something like the Jornada 720.  That presumably had a lot to do with the powerful CPU (the 624MHz processor could be throttled back to as little as 208MHz if you didn’t need the speed), and the new-fangled things like WiFi and Bluetooth.  Optionally, you could buy a double-life battery with the slight downside that this would protrude a little out of the back of the PDA – which might be an issue if you had slim pockets.

The position of the X30 on the keyboard dock made it difficult to plug in the mains adapter, but Dell thought of that and designed a socket in the back of the cradle making it very convenient to continue working with your PDA for extended durations.

Although many people much prefer today’s tablets and smartphones with their quick-response capacitive touchscreens, there’s something convenient about being able to dock a device directly into a bespoke foldable keyboard that makes it at not entirely inconvenient alternative to a laptop.  There aren’t too many laptops (or, indeed, tablets) that you can slip into your smallest pocket.