This is part of Nick’s Skype Challenge. Late last year, I bought an older Dell Axim X5 PDA from eBay. It’s in pristine condition, runs with a 400MHz CPU (which can be adjusted to save power). It’s a useful little toy, I can scribble down notes, browse the web, and go on instant messenger when I’m near an access point. I like it more than pen and paper (which I happen to like quite a bit).

Now, when I’m at school, I have very limited cell phone reception. That is, everyone does. A lot of campus isn’t in range of any cell phone towers, and Sprint users have it worse than Verizon (I’m a sprint person). Luckily, most of the main buildings I have class in all have access points, and as a result I took to installing Skype on my PDA to make calls. Calling landlines was free last year.

I’d only installed the “lite” version of Skype, unsure of how well it would work with the high-end version. The first time I tried this, I was only able to call and listen. For whatever reason, my microphone didn’t work. I shrugged at this and just left it alone until this week. I installed the latest version of Skype “lite” for PocketPC and, to my surprise, the microphone worked. I called Nick this morning and we were able to speak. However, it was difficult. I could only hear the first syllable of anything he said, then it either faded out or became a metallic tone rather than speech. For the hell of it, I installed the high-end version to see if it made a difference. It did. The call was more clear than before, but still nothing compared to the quality over PCs. I have a feeling this is either a CPU limitation or my compact flash wireless card. I’m not sure one way or another, so we’ll just have to find somebody to experiment with that has a faster PDA.

Also of note, the high-end version did lag the system a big, but did not jumble the speech.