Gone fishing! Well, not exactly, but I will not be posting here for the next week as my wife and I take some time off to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary. While I am away you can keep up to date by reading Pocket PC Thoughts, Pocket PC Passion, Brighthand, and Pocket PC.com. There will be a test when I get back.
posted by Frank McPherson 9:16 PM |
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Pocket PC Thoughts reports that the D-Link 802.11b CompactFlash card is not for sale at Buy.com. That makes two online retailers, CDW the other, selling this card.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:55 PM |
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Jerry Pournelle gives a luke warm endorsment of the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC in this week's Byte.com. The column has several subtle errors that indicate his Palm OS experience and an attempt to translate that to the Pocket PC. He points out that there are sleeve adapters that support PCMCIA cards, and that also means you can use CompactFlash. The implication is that the PCMCIA sleeve is the only one available, but there is a CompactFlash sleeve as well. He says, "The Graffiti program works well.." obviously referring to the handwriting recognition software on the Pocket PC, though I don't know if that means the character recognizer or Transcriber. At any rate I didin't realize that Graffiti is now synonymous with Kleenex. He calls ActiveSync the "coordination software" that works with Outlook 2000. I am not sure where that term came from, even Palm calls their software HotSync. In the end, he is plenty happy with his NEC MobilePro 780 though he thinks you might like the iPAQ.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:32 PM |
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Microsoft has released Active Sync 3.5. From the best that I can tell, you'll want this if you are running Office XP.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:24 AM |
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infoSync : Speak to your StrongARM Philip's speech processing division has ported it's VoCon continuous-speech recognizer for systems running Intel's StrongARM SA-1110 processor. In other words, we might be able to get a speech recongizer for the Compaq iPAQ.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:12 PM |
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Bitween - Remote Control for PocketPC This looks like a promising product. It appears to basically provide functionality similar to pcAnywhere, and the price of the Palm OS version that is currently shipping is $33. Of course you could go with the free VNC programs, but I have found those to be slow in my testing.
posted by Frank McPherson 2:01 PM |
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There have been a number of experiments done using Palm OS devices in classrooms, and this one is the first that I have seen about using Pocket PCs in classrooms. The effectiveness of computers in education has been a hotly debated topic for several years. The debate is rooted in our desire to improve the quality of education in the United States. Unfortunately, our impatience leads us to seek silver bullets, whether it be charter schools, different curriculums, or computers. All of these silver bullets ignore the most obvious fact about education -- effective education is almost entirely dependant on the quality of the teacher. PDAs, computers, and text books are all tools for teaching, and but only work as good as the teach using the tool. We must continue to provide creative teachers the tools they need to bring excitement to the classroom, and companies such as Compaq and Palm are to be commended for their contributions, but I wish there was as much money and energy put into attracting and developing better teachers.
And while I am on the subject of teaching. If you teach math check out PlotAGraph, which turns a Pocket PC into a great graphic calculator. If I were still teaching math I think I would really appreciate this program. <via Pocket PC Thoughts>
posted by Frank McPherson 10:57 AM |
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GoGa is an application that permits you to export your desktop machine's Lotus Notes Calendar information and transfer it to your Pocket PC Calendar. Contacts that are scheduled for meetings are added to the Notes field in the Calendar Entries.
Exports are limited to the size of your criteria specified in the scheduling Tab. A recommended export is one month. Note that this program provides export of calendar entries and not synchronization. <via Pocket PC Thoughts>
posted by Frank McPherson 10:34 AM |
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There appears to be more confirmation in the form of this article that Merlin will only support processors that use the ARM instruction set. There are those who perceive this as bad news, with Intel extending there monopoly. But this is standardization on an instruction set, not a chip manufacturer. Just as AMD is able to make chips that use the same instruction set as Intel, providing two manufacturers, multiple manufacturers will be able to make chips based on the ARM instruction set. Right now we know that both Intel and Motorola will be making ARM-based chips, and there is no reason why Hitachi, NEC and Toshiba couldn't do the same. (Keep in mind that British-based ARM Holdings is the owner of the instruction set.) Up to this point Pocket PCs have supported multiple instruction sets: ARM, MIPS, and SH3. All that has done was confuse people on what software they need (you need to make sure the software you download runs on the chip inside your Pocket PC) and hasn't lead to huge benefits. It's not like one instruction set provides better battery life, or is extremely cheaper. The bottom line to me is that the decision to support only one instruction set is a good for Pocket PC users.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:12 AM |
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