So yesterday evening my college bought me a HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, 128meg update and a 256meg sd card. Which honestly is far more than I expected. Thanks Niz and Miles
Anyway, i'm honestly going to blog it from now on, which will make up my report if I have to do one later on.
First thoughts, the screen is so beautiful and bright specially when compared to my old compaq 3630 ipaq. The colours have jumped to 16bit from 12bit but the contrast is perfect now. I never get enough glare to not see the text, even when reflecting the suns position into my own eyes.
At last I have wireless and bluetooth in the same compact framework and with the 128meg upgrade and sd card, I have enough memory to run anything I want. So now I use wifi when i'm in range and bluetooth with my t68i mobile phone for a slower gprs connection. See this is the reason why I needed my 3g phone to be bluetooth! Then I could dialup with that instead.
Oh and also you can redirect all mic and audio to a bluetooth headset! So if I cant get my old one working again, I'll buy one of 3's branded ones as there only 59 pounds and all i need.
There are some neat little things in pocketpc 2003 besides connectivity. At last theres a built in spell checker! Which makes a massive difference to someone like me.
Everything is so much quicker too, I played my old megadrive emulator on both ipaqs side by side and the new one can be alot faster than the old one but also generates the kinda of framerates i didnt think were possible.
I would also like add the biometric scanner is very good and at last I can secure my ipaq without using some complex unlock sequence. It would be nice though if you have the choice of strong password or biometric scan. At the moment i'm using pin or high security biometic (default). Tried out very strong biometric security but you got to get it perfect each time which isnt possible when performing normal tasks.
Found the new ipaq is compatable with the old jackets so I can still use my compact flash cards too. So imagine 256 + 128 + 60 = 444 meg of available space! And I got a 80 meg cf card spare too.
Anyway this also means I can plug into ethernet using a network pcmcia card, which is useful for friends houses and non wifi areas.
In my portable triangle the weak link is now battery life. Which I have yet to try out. As wireless and bluetooth has to be banging the battery for power. Which is good because the main battery is now removeable. Maybe I should have asked for a spare battery too? Well at least the usb cable charges and syncs as standard now.
I was a little disapointed with the software built in as standard, but have quickly realised that it doesnt matter because I have so much memory unlike the old ipaq where i had to put everything not needed by wireless onto the cf card.
But yeah i did think the remote control software would be there as well as the voice over ip software. Maybe there on cd I forgot to take with me?
My own dilemma is what to do with the old ipaq, as my wife wont use it for more than a couple of days. I dont want to sell it as I will get nothing for it and i dont know if i can keep this new ipaq (i'm pretty sure i can). So for now I'm going to retire the old ipaq and put it back in its box. Once i finish transfering files over bluetooth of course.
