I purchased a Dell Axim x50v handheld last year and was generally happy with it from the start.  The default OS at the time was Pocket PC 2003 SE, with an available upgrade to Windows Mobile 5 promised in the future.

Dell charged 40 bucks for the version 5 upgrade a month or so ago when it was generally released.  Of course, I immediately performed the upgrade after its release - only soon to be sadly disappointed.  The WM5 OS clearly wants more hardware resources than the previous 2003 version.

My one year old PDA had now become close to unusable.  The unit had become generally sluggish in any application I tried to run.  Apparently, there has been a discovery identifying the process that eats up all the cpu which causes it to become extremely slow.

There are several ‘tricks‘ attempting to bring the little booger out of its coma - however, it appears to produce limited results.  Thankfully Dell has acknowledged it is not ready for prime time and released a utility to downgrade the Axim back to Windows Mobile 2003.

Personally, I haven’t seen to many reasons to upgrade.  I do like the idea of persistent storage - which ends the chance of loosing your data in the event of a complete battery loss. That however, it not enough for me to deal with all the other problems in upgrading.

My opinion - an Axim x51v probably runs WM5 fine.  However, if you have a x50v - you are better off running 2003 SE…