WirelessDevNet: The Industry Standard's Wireless Newsletter ran a good "Best/Worst of 2000" list. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the text so do them a favor and subscribe. In a nutshell, here's the list:... Comeback of the Year. Microsoft's Windows CE rose from the grave as Pocket PC.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:58 PM |
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Has anyone used the Pretec CompactLAN? - Brighthand's Discussion Board Here is something that I did not know, the Pretec CompactFlash Ethernet card currently does not work with an iPAQ. I personal use Socket's Ethernet card and have absolutely no problems.
posted by Frank McPherson 4:54 PM |
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Gary Krakow is trying out the Fitaly on-screen keyboard.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:35 PM |
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The Problem with Pocket PCs Quick, someone get this guy a USB CompactFlash reader.
posted by Frank McPherson 7:33 PM |
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Windows Media Player for Pocket PC Technology Preview 2 has been released. It now provides support for Casio and HP Pocket PC devices, along with enhanced playback performance on iPAQs.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:56 PM |
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smaller.com - Sync This! As I read this article about Palmsource, and in particular the information in it about Palm's plans for the next revs of their OS, it is hard not to say, "Pocket PC already has that." In just about every way listed, Palm is adding features available right now on Pocket PC. But, isn't Palm the market leader? Tail wagging the dog?
posted by Frank McPherson 1:56 PM |
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Unwired-I.Net - Arne's Unwired Internet Diary Arne reports that Conduit's Peacemaker Pro can be used to exchange contact information between certain cell phones and Pocket PCs. I can also add that Peacemaker Pro also enables you to transfer scanned text from a C Pen to a Pocket PC. I am writing a how to about using the C Pen for PocketPC.com.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:53 AM |
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PDAK12 is updated to show the dates for when the three movies (see below) will be available. A Christmas Carol is supposed to be available for download today.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:32 AM |
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I finished downloading The Chinese Connection from the WindowsMedia.com site, copied it to a 128 MB CF card and tested it out with Media Player V7 on an iPAQ. It plays! The movie is formatted for wide screen, so you see this one inch tall, by about 2 inch wide display, but it plays. The Media Player default background isn't completely covered, which I find a bit distracting. The performance is not bad, there are some very slight pauses in the playback and the picture quality isn't the best, but that could almost be due to the movie itself rather than the playback. The movie is nearly 2 hours long, so that would be a good test of battery life. I'm thinking that it might be best to put the CF card in an adapter and use the PC Card expansion pack with the iPAQ to play this thing back. Something like this could be useful on a flight.
In case you don't know. The Windows Meda Player Version 7 only plays windows media video files, it does not play MPEGS. However, you can download a free copy of PocketTV, which does play MPEGS.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:32 AM |
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Linksys 802.11b Wireless works on CE - Brighthand's Discussion Board Here is an interesting post from a guy who got the Linksys 802.11b PC Card to work on a Jornada 820 using the Compaq WavLan driver.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:43 PM |
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Did you download Windows Media Player Version 7 for the Pocket PC and say to yourself, "well it plays video, but what can I play?" Well, you can go to the WindowsMedia.com Media Guide, click on the Movies tab, and download The Chinese Connection starting Bruce Lee. Be aware, however, that it is a 76 MB download, and obviously you will need a 128 MB CompactFlash or an IBM Microdrive to store the movie and play it on your Pocket PC. (Not to mention the fact that you want a high speed Internet connection to download this sucker, though it looks like the server hosting this file is also running a tad slow.)
PDAK12 says that there are two other moviews for download, but I haven't been able to find them on the site.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:07 PM |
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Inexpensive Wireless LANs Have Arrived for the Pocket PC Michael Lynch has written this great article on using wireless LANs with a Pocket PC. I've had a Symphony wireless LAN as part of my home network for nearly a year, and while it doesn't work with my Pocket PC, it does a good job of working with my HP Jornada 720 handheld. But I'm thinking about adding a WiFI (802.11b) wireless network to my network sometime next year, Unless Proxim releases an update to their RangeLAN2 driver that works flawlessly with Pocket PCs.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:32 PM |
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Palm Dives After Failing to Blow Away Expectations Ouch!
posted by Frank McPherson 11:26 AM |
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TeleType GPS for Windows CE, Pocket PC, Land, Air, Water Navigation I see that Teletype is shipping their PC Card GPS, which I imagine would work great on an iPaq. Now I ponder, how much space do the TeleType map files require? With the PC Card slot occupied with the GPS you would have to install the MAPS to internal memory. I don't know about you, but my iPaq only has 5 MB of internal storage space available right now. This might be a case where Cynet's CyPaq dual-slot expansion pack makes sense.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:40 AM |
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All of the excitement about the iPAQ flash ROM upgrade yesterday turned into nothing. It appears that we will have to wait until January. My guess is that the upgrade is done but Compaq is waiting till after the holidays to make sure they have enough support staff. You know, the one guy they have supporting Pocket PCs has to take vacation some time. :)
posted by Frank McPherson 9:46 AM |
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Pocket PC Thoughts has a blurb about the AOL 2.0 beta, along with a screen shot.
posted by Frank McPherson 9:42 AM |
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Ricochet 99now Offer I found some good news in my email this evening. The 128K Ricochet service is now available in the Detroit area. Now the bad news, it costs $74 per month for unlimited access. Yikes!
posted by Frank McPherson 10:35 PM |
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Strong Hand/Palm's tight grip on the market faces threats by Microsoft, others "IT people are probably going to be looking for an OS that's a bit more forward-looking than the Palm OS," Burden said. "Palm may evolve its OS to something close to that, but right now that's just talk."
posted by Frank McPherson 10:27 PM |
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The PIE friendly sites line on the home page appears to now be fixed.
posted by Frank McPherson 5:16 PM |
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PDA Buzz points to this Microsoft press release from July that Microsoft and Toshiba are jointly working on new LCD technology designed for optimal viewing of MS Reader books.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:01 AM |
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Let me take a brief momment to shamelessly plug my book. It would make a great Christmas present for any Pocket PC owner!
posted by Frank McPherson 10:28 AM |
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The link to the PIE friendly sites on the home page is currently broken. I won't be able to fix it until I get home tonight.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:26 AM |
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Is there another competitor for Jimmy in the Pocket PC game front? Is it just me, or does it seem that the most active area of Pocket PC software is games? That's probably a good sign since I think games where the most active area in the beginning of personal computers.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:22 AM |
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Brighthand has a letter from Compaq regarding the quality problems. In the letter it says the ROM upgrade will be released in January. The most disappointing thing to me in the letter is the comment about the digitizer problems. Compaq just wants me to apply more pressure -- I was hopping that the ROM upgrade would fix the problems I am experiencing.
The January date seems to conflict with information that Dale Coffing received. There are also some pictures posted in Brighthand's discussion area that shows the upgraded ROM information.
posted by Frank McPherson 9:49 AM |
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A rather dull Pocket PC Christmas season has been spiced up by news of Compaq releasing the Flash ROM upgrade for the iPaq today. Dale Coffing at pocketPCpassion was the first to break the news earlier this morning.
As of 9:39 AM EST the softpaq had not been released.
You can follow the discussion about the upgrade on the Pocket PC Passion discussion board,
posted by Frank McPherson 9:40 AM |
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Pocket PC Details? - PocketMatrix.com "Recently I took Pocket Word to its full potential by taking notes on my Compaq iPaq Pocket PC. I used a combination of Transcriber for text, Recorder for those hard to explain concepts, and Drawing to jot down diagrams. When I was done I had a great document that had a wealth of information. An interesting note about this was that my friend that sits next to me in class used his Handspring Visor Deluxe to take the same notes. My notes were 4 pages of text and pictures and about 10 minutes of recording. His was a page of plain text that covered the basic concepts of the lecture."
posted by Frank McPherson 12:12 PM |
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PocketMatrix.com - Everything. PocketPC. This is another Pocket PC friendly site. I'll be adding it to my directory later this evening.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:00 PM |
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PDA: Toshiba to Enter PDA Market - AnywhereYouGo.com A new Pocket PC manufacturer!
posted by Frank McPherson 11:53 AM |
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Here are some postings on Brighthand about the iPAQnet wireless service.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:08 AM |
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The EM-500 is supposed to be a great game machine, so last night I loaded Pacman only to discover that a good part of the game wouldn't display. I am told that I need to install the GAPI 1.2 upgrade.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:53 PM |
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I see that there has been a price drop on the HP 548 which is now down to $499. That's probably where it should have been at the beginning. HPShopping.com doesn't list the 545.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:49 PM |
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Last March, before the April 19 launch, I attended the Microsoft Pocket PC Reviewer's workshop. There were two important things about this workshop, first is that it was the first time that selected analysts and press saw the Windows for Pocket PC software. Second, it was the first time that all the Pocket PC hardware vendors were publicly showing their devices.
As I recall, I eagerly wanted to see what the hardware guys had done. At that time Casio was by far the most popular brand of Palm-size PC, thanks to their very popular E-100 and E-105 devices, which leapfrogged all of their competitors by introduciing multimedia to the platform. I would think it is fair to say that most attendees at this workshop expected Casio to maintain the lead with their new Pocket PC. As it turns out, that was not the case as Compaq surprised many with the design of the Compaq iPAQ. Though I recall at the time that I was greatly disappointed by Compaq's decision to not integrate a CompactFlash slot with the iPAQ. Since then I am warming up to the Expansion Pack concept, but I am starting to think that an iPAQ with a built-in MMC slot would be very cool.
I also recall being greatly disappointed by Casio. First, the only device that they were going to have available at the launch of the Pocket PC was the E-115, which was nothing more than the E-105 with an upgraded ROM. The first Casio Pocket PC device was the EM-500, which kept the beautiful screen that has now become standard for all Casio Pocket PCs, but only had 16 MB of RAM, used a new storage device in the form of Multimedia Cards that none of the other OEMs used, and the EM-500 wasn't going to be available until several months after launch.
This past weekend I aquired an EM-500, along with a 32 MB Multimedia Card, so over the next several days I will be posting my observations about this device as I become more familiar with it. Oddly enough, the thing that I have been most blown away by is the Multimedia Card. In March I did not see an actual card, all I could go by was the size of the slot in the prototype EM-500. MMC is incredibly small; much smaller than CompactFlash. I have pictures that show the size difference between the two that I plan to upload sometime this week. If you want to amaze anyone who knows a thing or two about computers, show them an MMC and pointed out that this postage-stamp-sized card contains 32 MB of RAM.
To me, MMC might be the coolest thing about the EM-500. Yes, the EM-500 is slimmer than the earlier Casio Palm-size PCs, and yes it still has the beautiful screen and the nice navigation button on the front of the device, and it uses a USB sync cable, but none of these things are new in comparison to the other Pocket PCs. MMC is different, and it is cool, but it does present some problems. Not the least of which is, how do I get content on the card from a PC, which is particularly desirable when you want to copy MP3 files or MPEGs to the cards.
I checked Sandisk's web site and found that they sell USB and parallel port versions of their MMC Imagemate card readers for $49. I already own one of these external devices for reading CompactFlash cards, and while one of these readers would work, I was hoping for something more like a PC Card adapter. How about a CF Card adapter for MMC cards?
Well, Sandisk sells a MMC FlashPath card, which is basically a floppy disk adapter that is used in floppy disk drives for $99. That's more to my liking, and the FlashPath cards are popular for those who use SmartMedia cards in their digital cameras. The downside is that it only works with a desktop or notebook computer with a floppy drive. A CF adapter would even work between Pocket PCs. The closest that I have been able to find is Pretec's CompactSSFDC Plus, which is a CompactFlash adapter for SmartMedia cards. Physically it is exactly what I want, perhaps Pretec will make a MMC version of this adapter? The CompactSSFDC Plus sells for $33 but only works with cards up to 32 MB. It looks like the best solution right now is the Sandisk FlashPath.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:29 PM |
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Central Command has an on-device virus scanner for Palm and Pocket PCs. This is different from McAfee's product which only scans Pocket PCs during synchronization.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:58 PM |
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O.K.SOFT - ContactViewer This is another alternative contact viewer for Pocket PCs. This viewer is similar to the Mobile Address Book application that comes with the Casio Pocket PCs. Both use a paper planner metaphor ala Lotus Organizer. I find these interesting given how many people complained about how the Palm-size PC apps wasted so much screen realestate. After my initial looks at these apps I think the built-in contacts is the cleanest. PocketInformant has the second cleanest display of contacts.
Mobile Address Book does provide a quick way to alternate between listing contacts by company and by name. With PocketInformant you can list contacts by First Name/Last Name, FileAs, which is the default for contacts, Last Name/First Name, and Company/First Initial & Last Name.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:54 PM |
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News: AvantGo Readies U.S. Senate Republicans for 107th Congress Apparently a group of Senators are going to be using AvantGo Enterprise to carry content on their PDA. I wonder if this is a loophole in the Senate's rules that prohibits notebook computers from being on the Senate floor.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:30 PM |
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Dave's Compaq Ipaq Dave says that Compaq has announced and is running their own wireless Internet service, called iPaqnet. He claims that Compaq is running a promotion, and he has a couple of screen shots on his page.
I went over to Compaq's site, and found the page about iPaqnet, Mobile Internet for the iPAQ Pocket PC and iPAQ BlackBerry. The deal uses the Sierra Wireless Aircard 300, and a PC Card Expansion sleeve. But the monthly price for unlimited access, with no roaming, is $59. That's a pretty high price to pay considering that Omnisky's service is $39 per month, although it isn't available for the iPAQ yet.
For a limited time when you sign up for one year of iPAQnet you will receive a $100 discount off the Aircard, and a waiver of the $50 activation fee.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:52 AM |
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