I’ve recently been trying to get my hands on a H4100 series iPAQ to put Linux on. The one I bought on ebay turned out to be the wrong model, but in the meantime I’ve been using Windows Mobile 2003.
My biggest complaint is the backwards way you have to switch between program; aparently you need to open up the Memory manager and ‘activate’ programs.
Frequent wireless drops are common too. I installed PortaPuTTy on the PDA, to use screen and irssi on the go. Wireless networks don’t seem to like the iPAQ however. Even with a strong single I get dropped fairly often.
The lack of multimedia support is very noticable. You are unable to listen to Icecast streams with WMP, nor can you play anything but WMV movies.
The Pro version I’m using has remote desktop support for Windows clients, which is nice (although mostly unusable at such a low resolution compared to the other machine).
You rely on the touchscreen to interface with the keyboard. Unfortuantely, the keyboard cannot be moved around the screen so it covers up some applications (like PortaPutty) so you cannot see what you are typing. This is a very big annoyance with me.
There is not much open source software ported to the iPAQ for Windows; many applications either don’t work (well or at all) or require payment after 30 days.
Windows Mobile 2003 has been a horrible experience, and I look forward to being able to use mplayer and firefox on my new H4155 iPAQ.
I look forward to trying Linux on my new iPAQ; after I do, I”ll be sure to post about my experience there.