Today I have been doing some testing with the Microsoft Pocket PC PowerToys and Pocket PC 2002. All of these PowerToys were developed for Pocket PC 2000, except the Theme Generator, which is specfic to PPC 2002. During my testing I have found incompatibilities. For example, the Power Contacts toy works ok for creating Tasks and Opening web pages, however the Create Appointment portion is broken in a couple of ways. First, the site says that it creates a new appointment with the contact as the attendee and subject. However, on both Pocket PC 2000 and 2002 the contact does not appear in the appointment subject. While the contact is inserted as an attendee, on Pocket PC 2002 the meeting notice is never added to the Outbox folder in Inbox, and consequently meeting notices will not be sent. The Internet Explorer tools power toy is not compatible with Pocket PC 2002. You can install the toy, but none of the settings stick. For example, if you try to use the toy to change the size of Internet Explorer's temporary files cache the setting does not stick after the recommended soft reset. It also appears that the Remove button, which is supposed to delete temporary files, does not work.
posted by Frank McPherson 6:09 PM |
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I am starting to have Bluetooth envy. First Dale writes about using Bluetooth to connect to an Ericsson R520 and surf the web using GPRS, now Arne Hess has posted some video that shows him connecting a Pocket PC using the Anycom Bluetooth CF card to an Ericsson T68 and surfing the web. I do have the Bluetooth module for my Ericsson T28 phone, but I would need to get one of those Bluetooth CF cards to connect to the Internet.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:41 PM |
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It's cool to see more people blogging Pocket PCs. compu2go.com is new Pocket PC blog. There are a couple of gems on this site, such as a tutorial on customizing your Pocket PC through skins. I also like this eBook Primer.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:09 PM |
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Todd Ogasawara has worked a bit with Westtek's ClearVue software and has written some comments about it worth reading.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:48 AM |
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allNetDevices: - U.S. GPRS Surge Moves to Detroit Cool, and I believe Voicetream's iStream is available here as well. Now the big question is, when will the prices be reasonable?
posted by Frank McPherson 1:16 PM |
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PCPocket Blog "OK, I've written this before, even on PDAntic.com (my Palm OS website). But WHY would anyone still say that Palm devices are cheaper when you have to spend $$$ to make them function just like a Pocket PC?" I just discovered this very good Pocket PC blog written by Steven Sande.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:29 PM |
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FPHandheld - Software Listing for Windows CE This is a very nice directory of medical Pocket PC software.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:07 AM |
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Digital Doc Soap Charting Software Digital Doc enables doctors to enter soap notes on a Pocket PC.
posted by Frank McPherson 9:59 AM |
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If you own a Pocket PC 2000 device, you can now upgrade Transcriber to the same version that is on Pocket PC 2002 devices. If you use Transcriber I definitely recommend this upgrade simply because of the improvements that have been made to corrections.
posted by Frank McPherson 9:51 AM |
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Pocket PC 2002 Annoyances: Pressing the Contacts button to turn on the Pocket PC and open Contacts also causes the categories to switch. I frequently have cases where All Categories switches to No Categories and I end up not being able to see a contact until I check the categories. Inbox also has a quirk where as you read messages and press the Next button to go to the next message you randomly end up at the top of the list, rather than at the next message. There also seems to be a problem deleting e-mail in Inbox. I have my Pocket PC configured to delete e-mail on connect/disconnect, and while that works with Pocket PC 2000, it doesn't work for Pocket PC 2002. It does seem to delete e-mail if you configure Inbox to delete immediately.
posted by Frank McPherson 3:36 PM |
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PDABuzz.com Discussion Forums - Research In Motion and VoiceStream Sign Supply Agreement For BlackBerry Wireless Email Solution This deal is tied to Voicestream's GPRS service, which makes me wonder, does RIM really need GPRS? I am not sure I get the benefit, other than this enables RIM to get off Bell South's Mobitex network.
posted by Frank McPherson 12:54 PM |
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Bluetooth smiles on Microsoft mobile OS "Microsoft snags Bluetooth certification for Windows CE and polishes up support for the networking technology, despite having left Bluetooth out of XP."
posted by Frank McPherson 5:33 PM |
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Back a few months ago Adobe came out with a free beta of the Pocket PC version of the Acrobat Reader. That was a very important release of software for the Pocket PC. How important? Where here is an example. Fellow Daynoter Dr. Jim Crider is using the Acrobat Reader to view the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease' Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook on his Compaq iPAQ. If Dr. Jim were to encounter such a disease, his iPAQ will be able to provide him with valuable information that could save a life.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:10 PM |
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I did not know this, but there is a patch for the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC for all Casio MIPS Pocket PCs and the HP Jornada 525.
posted by Frank McPherson 1:06 PM |
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Mobipocket Office Companion Product Details There now appears to be a new wealth of Microsoft Office viewing programs for the Pocket PC. First there is WESTEK's ClearVue and now MobilePocket weighs in with MobilePocket Office Companion. From the web page it appears to add an export option to the desktop MS Office Applications, which creates versions of the documents that you can open using the free MobilePocket Reader. It claims to retain all document formatting. If it works as advertised, its $19.95 price tag could make it the preferred document viewer for Pocket PC.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:32 AM |
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I just checked out Stellarmetrics'Theme Master and it's a disappointment. It claims to be a theme manager, but it doesn't really work with themes. Instead, it copies the main Today page graphic to a gif file, and then displays that. However, that means that the navigation, command bar, and start menu backgrounds do not change and get mis-matched from the graphic. I quickly deleted this program from my Pocket PC.
posted by Frank McPherson 11:16 AM |
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Pocket PC Videoconferencing News PocketBone might be a NetMeeting client that runs on Pocket PCs.
posted by Frank McPherson 10:52 AM |
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Here is something that I completely forgot to mention. Last Tuesday marked the one year anniversary of this weblog. I don't know how many regular readers I have, though I did receive 17 votes for the Pocket PC Magazine Users Choice awards. This log has primarily been a tool that I have used to keep track of Pocket PC information, which I make available to everyone. I have not had aspirations to be like Pocket PC Thoughts, or Pocket PC Passion. Yet, at the same time I do hope to provide something of value to my readers. I guess if you keep coming back I must be doing something right.
One of the ideas I have been kicking around is taking the year's worth of content and compiling it into one MS Reader book. That way I could have a complete offline copy of the archives from this site to carry around for reference. Given that everything that I write here is in straight HTML, I think it shouldn't be too difficult to put together, it just takes some time! If I put the eBook archive together I will make it available for download.
posted by Frank McPherson 4:03 PM |
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I have discovered another quirk with Mazingo. As I wrote yesterday, you can configure Mazingo to put it's content on storage cards. What I have just discovered is that if you configure the Mazingo PC client to automatically synchronize content, it will put the content on any Pocket PC, not just the one on which you have Mazingo installed on. I have just installed Mazingo on my HP Jornada 565, in which I keep a Viking 128 MB CompactFlash storage card. However, I just connected a Compaq iPAQ with a storage card to my desktop and the Mazingo PC client downloaded the content from the web and downloaded it to the storage card that is in the iPAQ. This makes me wonder if I had Mazingo configure to put content in Internal storage whether it would automatically download the content to the internal storage of every Pocket PC that connects to my desktop with the Mazingo client installed? If that is the case it would be very bad. To prevent this from happening I have configured Mazingo to not automatically synchronize content every time the Pocket PC connects.
posted by Frank McPherson 3:54 PM |
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