This is to be a short review of my experience with the iPAQ up to the present. I was walking through a local Staples picking up a few odd's n' ends for my drawing kit, when I stopped by the Little Gadgets Section © to pine after all the things that I wished I could have. I was thinking, "man I wish I could afford one of those!" It was about then that I realized I could. Fortunately the only one there in the store was a return, as that allowed me to get a $50 discount. The box was
torn apart as is the previous purchaser was a raptor with a particulary bad case of Parkinson's. Does this describe the level of schreddedness in an adequate way? So I brought home the iPAQ in a plain brown box. After setting up the software and the charger/syncing base I was finally up and running. One of the first things I liked was the ability to sync and to download stuff into the flash card (or anywhere in the unit for that matter) at the same time. Bitchin! One of the problems I've had is that my Windows 2000 machine will kill the USB stack randomly. I haven't been able to pin down the problem though. But anyway, I've found some neat software for WinCE 3.0. The least of not is
PocketQuake! I've been able to use Odysseus at work quite frequently and not just for showing off or playing MPG movies with PocketTV or MP3's with Window's Media Player 7 (because the standard Windows Media Player
could not frickin' play files from the Compact Flash cards!!!!) but for actual work, like taking notes during meetings and such. Luckly I was also able to get all my contacts on the device from my pager (a
Timeport P935, I work for Motorola MSP, we write the software for the pager) and my calendar from Outlook, which I assumed I could since Microsoft wrote both. Dissapointingly I can't find a Pocket Powerpoint. Another cool feature, though logically I can't think of why it's cool; a picture viewer, though I only keep small, both in size and in dimension, jpg's on Odysseus.
Avantgo.com provides a neat service where they store offline webpages in your device for viewing during the day. I have the Weather Channel, Space.com, Linux Mandrake, CNN.com and some others. The only problem I have is that I don't often have emough time during the day to read all that stuff!.
Additionally Microsoft provides a reader program that allows you to read eBooks. This is a pretty cool feature since the reader app allows the text to be rendered in larger sizes and with anti-aliasing (or blended so that it seems that it is). I found a free text to eBook converter so now I could convert files from
Project Gutenberg into eBooks I can read,
for free, as apposed to the plethora of eBooks I could pay for from any number of eBooks web publishers. I'm just not ready to buy a book that I can't hold and put on a shelf to impress people who are impressed by that sort of thing.
One thing that has struck me as positively capitalist is the sheer number and
price of the accessories for the iPAQ. The PCMCIA Card Expansion Pack I am longing for now (so I can have wireless access to our network at work through 802.11b) costs, are you sitting(?), $160. Yeah, it has a backup battery too, but really, $160?!?! The 802.11b card alone is $100! What is so damn expensive about this pack? Does it have a brick of frickin' gold in it or something? Not only that but the much anticipated Compact Flash/PCMCIA/Battery Expansion Pack is $230. Not to mention the serial cradles which can sell for up to $40 (though the one I got for work was only ~$25, which is in addition to the USB cradle I have at home). However CompUSA doesn't sell the AC adapter.
Don't even get me started in the roaming wireless access charges and equipment.So what this all boils down to is the staggering amount of money one could blow on this device as if it were a crank additiction. Careful what you lust after!
