Rating: 
Summary: Wireless Access is Good but Battery Life is Poor!
Review: More than a year ago I made a switch from the PalmOS-based Handspring Visor to this PocketPC-run Toshiba e740. The switch was motivated by my desire for native Windows compatibility and for a built-in wireless capability.At both fronts Toshiba e740 has performed as advertised. Syncing with Microsoft Outlook is effortless and cruising the Internet on my wireless Linksys home network is flawless. What I didn't expect was such a short battery life, and the poorly designed stylus and its holder. I believe that the poor battery life is due to both high consumption and frequent inadvertent turning of the devise on rather than due to insufficient battery capacity. (The standard battery is rated by Toshiba at a decent 1000 mAh). Even after checking address book and calendar only a few times during the day one may drain the battery to 60% of its full capacity even with moderate screen brightness. Toshiba support staff gave me several explanations for this high battery consumption mainly that the unit uses electricity to communicate with the add-on storage cards even when e740 is off. The more important reason for the poor battery life, in my opinion, is the unintentional turning on of the device in my pant's pocket. Along the upper left side of the devise sticks out the Recorder button. Pressing the button turns e740 on and launches the Recorder function. The button cannot be deactivated and it is almost impossible not to depress it while having the PDA in the pant's pocket. I tried several leather cases: (1) Toshiba sleeve shipped with e740, which is ugly and useless; (2) Belkin SKU 772053 leather case (which is compact but ineffective in stopping inadvertent activation of the Recorder button), and (3) Toshiba zipped case PA1313U-1PCS (which is effective but so bulky that there is no pant's pocket large enough to accommodate it). Another annoying feature is the flimsy plastic stylus that won't stay in its holder because the only thing that is supposed to keep it in is the friction between the very top of the stylus and the top of the plastic-lined holder. Buying replacement plastic styli from Toshiba (PA3182U-1ETC) will only waste your money as these styli won't stay put in e740 either. If you ask Toshiba support staff for help, they will tell you to put some Scotch tape around the stylus. Wow! Through trial and error I have found these two solutions for above problems: (1) aluminum case from Rhinoskin (here at amazon.com), and (2) metal stylus from pdapanache.com. Finally I can now enjoy all the wonderful things that come with e740.
Rating: 
Summary: STAY AWAY
Review: Owned the e740 for over a year, here is what I have found
frequent lock ups
slow performance
non upgradeable
poor battery life
poor sound quality from speaker
bad video playback
bottom line, I just don't like using the thing.
I am a computer science major, and I recongnize bad product design and implemention when I see it. This is why Toshiba has for all practical purposes abandon this product and left its customers with a faulty product that can not be corrected. Most of its problems are in its hardware. Get an IPAC or a Palm
Rating: 
Summary: Impressed despite other reviews
Review: Read all the reviews on here before I bought it, and decided to get it anyway. So far it has been wonderful. Activesync works perfect, WIFI is awesome, and there is so much you can do with it. Loosing everything (and I mean everything) when the battery dies sucks, but you can backup and restore with no effort and it is no longer a problem. It may not be as fancy as an iPAQ, but you can't beat what you get for the $$$.
Rating: 
Summary: Nobody's Perfect
Review: The Toshiba e740 is a great tool for anything you might want to do. PDA's only came out within the last decade so as is expected there are a few kinks to iron out. Ever the optimist, I will begin with the good news. When it works, the WiFi is a GREAT thing to have. I am a university student, and they have a wireless network there. In my experience the WiFi has been pretty fast, but that will vary from location to location. One of the things I love most is the dual expandability via an SD slot AND a CF slot!!! which means you can use a memory card in one while using a peripheral! Or you can share cards with various digital cameras and other such devices. I used to have a Jornada 568, good device but the screen was unevenly lit. However, the screen on the e740 is much more evenly lit, any lighting gradient is almost imperceptible. Of course it is always great to have 64Mb of memory a nice metallic casing and relatively sleek styling. Here are a few little pet peeves before I get to the meat. It is slightly heavy. Compared to my jornada, which I could use for days, the battery life is a little short although longer than t he ipaq. I was also a little disappointed that not all 64Mb was available as storage as it is on the Jornada. The e740 does not have a backup button battery, as does the Jornada, so that means if you remove the battery, you lose all your info. I did however take it to the repair center and they somehow fixed that for me under warranty. I don't know how they did it, but now I can remove the battery without losing my info. But we need a backup battery!! Of course this would not be much of an issue if the battery-securing system was better designed. It was so bad that Toshiba had a recall on it, and so I went to get that face but after a couple days, the battery was ALMOST as loose as before. It is just a horrible design in general, I strongly suggest Toshiba rethink that because it is crucial! The battery indication software has the annoying habit of instantaneously "discharging" to and holding at 60% or 1%. This is aggravated when the WiFi is engaged; it's almost guaranteed to happen. It is a very annoying problem because the device automatically turns off the device, believing there is n o more power and it becomes useless unless you have your AC adapter with you. I sent it in once again for repair and Toshiba replaced my motherboard AND my battery under warrantee, and the problem has not reoccurred since, but it's only been a few days, we will see. My most recent project has been to discover why sometimes my device cannot detect an ip on a DHCP network. I talked to a supervisor today (the only helpful person in the place) and he told me to download an update on their website that apparently deals with that problem. We will see how that goes. My biggest pet peeve has to be that 75% of the staff at their tech support center a) don't speak great English, which complicates communication, and b) they know very little about the pocket pc. One guy kept me on hold for 20 minutes using up my precious cell phone minutes, when he returned he told me he had been doing research, that led him nowhere. All I wanted to know was what the man's supervisor was able to tell me in 5 minutes without putting me on hold. Time is money and I am sure Toshiba's customers have better things to do than wait while the tech support guy fumbles around doing things we ourselves could be doing. Sorry for the length of this review but I thought fellow e740 owners might appreciate my "wisdom" and learn from my problems. It was all worth it though because all in all, the e740 is a great device. I'm sure no device is perfect and that they all have their problems.
Rating:
Summary: Batteries not worth diddly
Review: I used to own one of these things, and I used mine to read books most of the time. However, I found the battery life to be almost useless, because it required recharging every 3 days or so. If I forgot to recharge, I would always have to restore my backup, and that was dicey at best. Finally, I just stopped using it altogether, and my kind hubby got me a sony clie' to replace it with. I couldn't be happier...nice color screen, batteries that last over a week w/o recharging, no lost data, no record button to accidentally record with. Oh, and half the price too. With all the rebates on that, it came out to $85. Although the e740 did mp3's just fine, I never used mine for that purpose, so the clie' was a good replacement for me. If you need an expensive mp3 player that might do other stuff for you, the e740 would be a "good" choice. Otherwise, look into sony's line of pda's...much more reliable. :)
Rating:
Summary: Unreliable - Just look at all of these 1 star reviews...
Review: I received the e740 from my employer for evaluation a week ago. Since then I have lost my saved data three times. The record button is sticking out the side of the damn unit so that every other time I put the e740 in its case, it turns on the unit and drains the battery. (This has been mentioned several times by Amazon reviewers.
Additionally, I have never seen so many bad reviews for an electronics product on Amazon.That should serve as a warning flag to any potential buyers.
All in all, the e740 should be avoided unless your getting it used for less than thirty bucks. That's about the most I'd pay for this toy.
Rating:
Summary: This is a GREAT pocket PC
Review: i don't know what everyone's problem with this pocket pc is. i've had it for about a month now and i love it, not only is it a wonderful organizer, voice recorder (at great quality..can even be used to record live songs at a concert), it is a great MP3 player with great output. and to top it all off it even has wireless LAN capability - which i have used and love! not to mention the CF and Secure Digital slots!
i love it!
Rating:
Summary: Not worth a penny!!!!
Review: This thing stinks. The battery runs out before you can even get working. WLAN capabilities are worthless. The unit is junk. They should buy these back!! There is a good reason the price keeps dropping. I would consider Dell Axim x3i for the low budget (<$300) or the HP 5550 ($600) for the higher end folks.
Rating:
Summary: A BIG DISAPPOINTMENT
Review: I bought my Toshiba Pocket PC e740 immediately when it hit the market, since (unfortunately) I was in Los Angeles, USA, at the time of its launch. I therefore paid the full price for it (more than [price on website]!)
What a big disappointment e740 has turned out to be.
The battery is out of power most of the time! And I lost a lot of data because of this.
I surrendered after 1 month and gave my unit to my sister for her use in her masteral studies at Georgetown University.
Hahahaha, what a mistake on her part to have accepted it! She told me that she has lost a lot of data due to the frequent discharging of the battery power.
She has returned the unit to me and now I am stuck with this useless, disappointing Toshiba product which I now know has lost almost...its value after more than just a year.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT!
Rating:
Summary: Out of character for Toshiba
Review: Unfortunately, I bought this right after it came out, paying the full $500, and as others have said, it hasn't come close to living up to all the promises made by Toshiba and Microsoft. The wireless networking works so-so, if you don't mind pathetic range and constantly resetting the system. It plays mp3's well enough. It does Ebooks well. I've gotten a couple games to play ok. It doesn't sync worth a damn, so I end up using CF and SD cards for updating and such. The battery doesn't last worth beans, so I bought two high capacity batteries for it. This makes the device very bulky, and takes many hours for it to charge, which is odd, as my 18v power tools can fully charge in less than an hour. At first I lost much data, time, and effort when this device had it's data loss issues. I ended up installing a very minimum amount of software and programs, and for the past 3 months I haven't lost anything, which is a sorry thing to be grateful about, considering how much I paid. Often, even with undemanding applications such as MS Reader, this thing will lock up for several minutes while it does it's thing. When pulling the device out of it's supplied case, it's all too easy to hit the record button, in fact, it's difficult not to hit it. The high capacity batteries went through a recall, which Toshiba handled well, my only complaint having to wait 4 months for a replacement. Toshiba has decided not to offer the upgrade to PCP 2003. I consider this a rip-off. The ability to upgrade this device was why a lot of people bought it in the first place, and also why they kept it despite finding out the performance was hampered by the OS. Both Microsoft and Toshiba are to blame. After all, aren't this things supposed to be somewhat standardized? In the past, I've had nothing but great experiences with Toshiba products, which was at least half the reason I chose the e740, despite this being a brand new product. It seems Toshiba has learned a thing or two from their unofficial 'beta test'...the new 800 is a huge improvement, at least in looks, button placement, and screen. However, I'm not about to throw away an $800 investment in batteries and such, cough up another $800, just to become another paying beta tester. I'm hoping this isn't becoming standard practice for Toshiba. I hate to see a good company go in the crapper, like HP, Compaq, Apple, and so on.
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