Trium Mondo

Although the Trium Mondo pda handheld faired badly when launched with its £400 price tag, it doesn't look so bad today as you can pick up good examples from Ebay for £50 and under. For that money, the Trium Mondo looks an altogether different PDA. A combined PDA and mobile phone for under £50? Sounds like a bargain to me.

I'm disappointed that you can't use a Mondo with Apple Mac computers but it does run Windows so that level of compatability shouldn't be expected, I suppose.

The Trium Mondo PDA is clearly a step forward, but it could have been much better. The addition of more memory would benefit the device more than anything else. Some form of external storage, or memory card would allow better use of some of the features, like playing MP3 or WMA files, at the moment there is not room to store more than a few on the device.

The internet browser works well, and is a huge improvement over WAP. The only problem is the lack of storage space to allow pages to be downloaded to the device. I would quite like to be able to download whole sites to browse offline, but they simply won't fit in the memory.

Being able to record notes, or write them, is a very useful feature. The internal memory is able to store a large ammount of recorded voice, although the quality isn't good enough for music (the quality can be set for music, but then there is too little memory to be of use).

The tasks and appointments also prove to be useful, particularly as they can be set to sync with a desktop PC. Using GPRS I think this device could prove to be useful in the mobile maintenance industry, where it could be kept up to date at all times.

The Mondo is quite solid, and seems to be well put together, although I have yet to drop it more than a few feet.

The cradle for connecting to other PCs would be much better if it used USB, as the serial connection is slow. This is particularly noticeable if you sync a lot of contacts or notes. Large files take forever to transfer, but then again there is not enough memory to store them anyway...

I am not sure what the infrared capabilites of the Mondo actually are (nor does it explain in the manual). I have pointed several IRDA devices at the IR port, and just seem to get a message saying 'connecting to "other device name"' nothing more seems to happen. I don't have IR on my desktop, but suspect that it can only be used to sync the device to a PC.

So to sum it up....

If you want to use the Mondo for notes, appointments, contacts and managing tasks, then this may well be the device for you.

If you want to play MP3 files and the like, then you will find that the Mondo is not for you. You would be better looking at a PDA with the features you want, and a seperate phone.

I hope you found this review useful.

The Trium Mondo is one of several pda/mobile phones around with cool touchscreen effects. However, this is severely compensated by a myriad of petty faults which will seem annoying in the long run. Its meagre 16Mb of built in memory without the possibility of memory slots renders its MP3 facility useless as its applications would tend to use up 8Mb, and leaving the other 8mb for documents, or the equiv. of 2 normal MP3's at 128kbit quality. Its slow, unresponsive touchscreen facility when using the phone application can be a nightmare. Its SMS facility was a disappointment and requires an expert to configure, whilst its predictive written text input system was even worse. It is extremely bulky and lacks versatility, so unless you plan on keeping the phone within the office, this is a terrible "don't".