Slashdot Mirror

I see no compelling reason to get this over a Dell Axim X51v (or if you're on the cheap, an X50v off ebay).
-High res screen? Check. Resolution is only slightly less -- 800x480 (iirc) vs 640x480, which still kicks the crap out of any phone on the market.
-Wireless? Check.
-Bluetooth? Check.
-*Far* faster processer, making things like watching xvid-encoded movies off of either a CF or SD card a breeze using such freeware as TCPMP. Use DVD Decryptor and Auto GordianKnot and entire DVDs can be compressed to 800-900 megs with amazing quality, making it easy to keep yourself entertained on flights or train commutes.
-No comparison for software -- the Axims run Windows Mobile, which has hundreds of free and commercial games and various apps available.
-True PDA functionality
-GPS add-ons if you're into that
-Syncs with Outlook
-CHEAP. I picked up an x50v with loads and loads of extras (aluminum case, long life battery, travel charger, car charger, car mount, 2 GB CF card, etc) off of ebay for $250. Heck, there's even an add-on to get ota TV stations.

In addition to several "no-name" asian breand, most of current Samsung models play OGG (next to MP3 and WMA) out-of-the-box. And that's a brand that is quite widespread in shops.

Several older asian player, that were mostly pure software player, with a general purpose processor and decompression implemented as a interger/fixed-point software in the firmware, can be flashed to add support for additional formats (ie.: using official plugins from the constructor, no need to completly replace the firmware with RockBox).

Also, most PDA and SmartPhone (except the future locked-iPhone) can install software player that support playing OGGs from the flash media (or from the internal drive if you happen to have some model like the LifeDrive). TCPMP is such an example for Palm OS and Win CE.

Hate me for pointing out a MS product

* Great media player capabilities: Though it won't play DRMed content, it plays standard Divx and MP3s with free software from the Web. (The video player software that came with it was some annoying proprietary thing. The MP3 player was fine, but the free media player I got plays OGGs too.) Battery life can be a problem with long movies, but not for episodes of The Venture Brothers, well if only there were some way to get episodes of that show in DiVX format, I mean. (Oh, The Simpsons, The Tick, GitS: SAC , Paranoia Agent Futurama whatever turns you on... live action TV too, an hour is no problem.)

* Great gaming capabilities: I mean it has a touch screen and an analogue stick... but unfortunately not so much commercial software. Stuntcar Extreme which came with it, is great for showing off it's 3D graphics, rumble feature, and smooth controls using the analogue stick and buttons. For a game that uses the touch screen, the Warfare Inc. demo is kind of fun, and it comes with a version of Solitaire. Homebrew has been sort of hit or miss for me. I like Beats of Rage, but most of the other stuff I tried to install required a memory wipe.

* All the note taking, life organizing, alarm clock type features you would want. Oh, and I downloaded a Tone Dialer for it that works but you have to get the speaker of the Zodiac really close to the reciever.

Annoyingly, the Tapwave Zodiac failed marketwise, I'm not sure why. I'm guessing they had too much debt and needed to hit it big right away. Or perhaps it was simply to beautiful for this world.

Anyway, buy a Tapwave Zodiac! It will make your life better! Chicks dig them... well, ok not all... maybe not even most, but I'm sure some do. Besides it's cheaper than a porsche!

On my Windows Mobile 2003SE I use:

- CAB Installer: you can select where install programs
- GSPlayer: Simply audio player for Pocket PC
- Mozilla Minimo: web browser
- Opera for windows mobile: web browser
- TCPMP: media player
- Total Commander: file manager
- Vbar: task manager
- WiFiFoFum2: the best WiFi scanner and war driving software for Pocket PC
- PocketPuTTY: ssh access
- .NET VNC: VNC viewer

I will suggest also a daily visit :) to this great website: FreeCABs (Your Link to Free PPC Software which can be installed without a PC connection)

This basically confirms my suspicions, that the technology hasn't gotten to the right level yet.

I'm also a huge fan of the handwriting recognition on my Pocket PC; however, it does require a specific deviation from my normal handwriting. At the same time, not everybody can read what I jot down on regular old paper, so maybe I'm the better for it - but that's besides the point. Handwriting recognition in Windows Mobile (I'm using PPC v. 2003, if that's worth pointing out) is good, but not good enough. It'll get there someday, though.

At the same time, I love keyboard - even small "thumb board" - input, and I'm nearly convinced I'll eventually either grab the thumb-board addon for my Dell Axim x50v, or a bluetooth mini-keyboard. Still, nothing beats using a pen-sized stylus and writing into my Word docs while on the subway. After barely a day of frequent use, it now feels natural to me.

That said, by and large the reason I love my Pocket PC is for its versatility. I read my books off of it, listen to my OGG Vorbis files and watch XviD DVD rips with it, play Snails on it... Oh yeah, and all that document authoring, e-mail, web browsing, contact management, scheduling crap that other people talk about. And it's all in my pocket. I love it.

But I wouldn't mind trying out a Nokia 770 someday. The stuff the community's brewing is very exciting.

Oh well, at least we'll be able to find "videopodcast" content easier once this stuff goes mainstream.

Grab a copy of SharpMusique, And use TCPMP to play it on your Palm, PocketPC, or Windows box. Or, grab a copy of VLC for your platform of choice..

The keyboard is not ideal, and I miss Grafitti, but it's more than usable

That's why I use Graffiti Anywhere on my Treo 600. It lets you do grafitti right on the screen. I have mine set to activate when I tap the upper right 5 pixels of the screen.

it's nice to be able to listen to mp3s on this once in a while but you're crazy if you want this to replace your music player

I'm curious. Why? I use my Treo 600 as my primary mp3 player and It's been great. What problems have you run into?

People laugh about the camera,

With qset, you can change the default jpeg quality (around 60 or so) all the way up to 99. Still, I've found the camera works much better in sunlight than indoors.

BTW, if you don't already have it installed, you ought to try out TCPMP. I use it to watch all kinds of video (divx, xvid, you name it). I can compress a full 2 hour movie down to about 70 megs. I've also installed several game console emulators on it (NES, GB, SG, etc.) and play them frequently. The digital camera can even be a video camera. I use it to take short home movies and then export to mpegs. Just thought you might be interested in some Treo apps I've found very helpful.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an Apple-hater -- far from it. I use a Mac at work (designer) all day long, and you'd have to to pry my PowerBook® from my cold dead hands and all, but anyone that thinks it's earth-shattering is more than slightly behind the times. I've been watching video (divx, xvid, you name it), listening to mp3's *and* oggs for almost 2 years now on my Treo 600. It's also my cell phone, calendar, addressbook, yada-yada... I can even use it to ssh, vnc, ftp, or connect to Samba shares on my server at home and run several game console emulators on it (NES, GB, SG, etc.). The video iPod does have more disk space (although I've never had problems filling up my Treo's 2 Gig expansion card -- which card I can swap out for more space, if I ever *do* need it). Another key advantage is that my Treo 600 is also a digital camera and can even be a video camera. I use it to take short home movies of my kids when we're at the park or fair, or whatever and then export to mpegs. Not that the video iPod isn't cool and all, I'd just like to see more honesty in reporting the originality of the feature set.

Actually, I put 1-1.5GB XviD-compressed full DVDs on my Microdrive. I usually compress to a resolution of 704 pixels wide, and the Axim is able to downscale it to 640 just fine using Beta Player. It was a daily habit of mine a while back to take a DVD backup to keep me occupied on the subway (now ebooks do that job).

Microdrive was the best thing I bought for it. I also have a 512MB SD card in there, but I use it for applications (documents and files go on the MD).

To blur the iPod functionality lines a bit further, I could try this - although Windows Media Player is hardly my most used app.

The best PPC video player is TCMP; the PalmOS port is also great. It's played everything I've thrown at it thus far.

From http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about
Supported file containers
- AVI (*.avi)
- Matroska (*.mkv, *.mka)
- MP4 (*.mp4, *.m4a)
- Ogg Media (*.ogg, *.ogm)
- ASF (*.asf)

Supported audio codecs
- Mpeg 1 Layer III
- Ogg Vorbis
- Musepack
- Windows Media Audio (on Windows Mobile devices)
- AC-3
- AMR
- Adpcm, uLaw

Supported video codecs
- DivX
- XviD
- MPEG4-SP (plus B-frame support)
- MPEG1
- M-JPEG
- Windows Media Video (on Windows Mobile devices)

what you use to play the video on your palm?

TCPMP is free and works well for me, plays MPEG and most MPEG4 derivative formats (though you'll probably have to reencode to 320x240 to keep from skipping frames).

There's a great program for ARM pocketpcs called The Core Pocket Media Player. It's F/OSS and runs absolutely great. It'll play divx, mpg, wmv, mp3, ogg, asf and some more on top of it. I'd highly recommend that over the media player that comes built into windows mobile these days.

http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about

2nd reply to bring the url to the surface- it's by far the best media player for Windows CE I've seen yet, and it's open source. I've yet to see how it's playlists work- but the zoom feature alone is far in excess of WMP, it might end up my favorite media player of all time.

I'm not sure that you've used them the in the best mannor. The hotsync isn't a good way to get data onto the palm. The SD card slot is. Just put whatever media you want to listen to or play and use TCPMP to listen/watch. The same goes for documents such as .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. Photos can be stored in the card just like any camera.

There's a great program for ARM pocketpcs called The Core Pocket Media Player. It's F/OSS and runs absolutely great. It'll play divx, mpg, wmv, mp3, ogg, asf and some more on top of it. I'd highly recommend that over the media player that comes built into windows mobile these days.

http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about

The movie player requires that files are in the magic folder with magic filenames ... You could install some programs on it, but as I mentioned above everyone required payment for their crappy utilities.

For video playback that's open source and plays just about anything, you might give TCPMP a try ...

There's no real solution for free mp3 playback, but Aeroplayer will play OGG files for free, and handles folders fine.

I've used a set of HP Bluetooth headphones for several months now, with a Dell Axim PDA. The sound quality isn't great but it's very listenable and vastly better than the built in speaker. The excellent Core Pocket Media Player (formerly Betaplayer) supports all kinds of video and audio (including Ogg) and also supports the audio controls on the headphones. You need an updated Bluetooth stack with a high quality audio profile, it's freely available for Dell's PDAs and probably others. Of course, iPaqs work out of the box.

The only drawback is that video takes up huge amounts of space on your SD cards, which are pricey. But, if you're willing to spring for 'em, there's two SD slots on the Zodiac, so you could buy a pair of cheaper cards instead of one large, expensive one.

After reading your post and staring blankly at the screen for a few moments in disbelief, I can only come to the conclusion that:

A) You're a troll
B) You're drunk
or
C) You work with a bunch of saboteurs that intentionally crash their Treos to get paid downtime.

I've had my Treo 600 for about 2 years, now, and have experienced none of the problems you've described. The GP's description of no more than 1 crash per month is very accurate. Anytime it has crashed, it quickly boots right back up. I've never had to send it in to be serviced.

For those that think that a Palm is just an "organizer" and a PokcetPC is a "pocket computer", don't buy into stereotypes. I use my Treo as a computer. I have an ssh client installed that I use frequently to work on some servers I admin for. The thing came with a capable web browser, but I have many options to install something else, if I want. I also have a Samba client that works great, an FTP client, a VNC Client, and an Instant Messenger. Somebody already mentioned the superb movie player TCPMP, but that's not all, I also have a Video recorder that makes use of the Treo's built-in digital camera. I use a perl script I found to convert the video to mpeg1. I use a Photoshop-like image editor that has support for complex things like layers and blending modes. My Treo is also my mp3/ogg player and I use it to listen to podcasts in the car. I read ebooks and even /. using Plucker. I take audio notes using SoundRec. I even have a Python interpreter, and can code native apps in C right on my Palm. I won't even bother to mention all the games that are available. You can google for them yourself. I've seen apps out there for viewing/editing Word Docs and Excel files, but having never had a need for that, haven't installed them.

It has a nice ATI graphic chip in it, which has been put to good use in:

* A version of MAME,
* A combo SNES/Gensis/Turbo Graphix/Gameboy emulator. The SNES emu is flawless, and I'm enjoying playing a lot of games that I'd half forgotten about.
* An accelerated version of the TCPMP player
* A mess of Zodiac enabled games. I'd say that the 3D quality is somewhere between a PS1 and a PS2.
* Hexen, Doom and Quake ports by the same developer that did Little John Z.

Plus, the Zodiac 2 has Bluetooth, two SD slots (one SDIO), great widescreen display, aluminum case, and it is small. It ships with a decent mail client and a so-so web browser. It gets pretty nice battery life, too. It supports most SD wifi cards, another plus.

It has turned out to be the best entertainment and "road warrior" PDA that I've ever owned, bar none.

jh

I've used palm for over 6 years, and I've been very happy. At first, I used a palm IIIc, and I just upgraded to a treo 650. They are great devices, very fast, and it does everything I need. Sure, it doesn't play 3D games, but there are a host of products out there, both games and productivity based... and contrary to what the article says, the palm is very stable.

Although they don't have OS level memory protection, I had my palm IIIc (excepting one program) crash twice in four years, and once I got my treo setup, it crashes very rarely (once a month, at most). I've NEVER had the palm crash in Palm's own applications. If a program has a serious flaw, it WILL restart the palm.

Honestly, the OS restarting on an application crash isn't that big of a deal, anyway. All programs save their state when you switch out of them, so even after a reboot, you don't lose your work in the programs. And the reboot takes only about 10 seconds--so it's really not bad at all... when it happens.

And, the palm can play videos... very well. With TCMCP , you can even play PC-sized divx encoded video on the palm. The Treo 650's 312 MHZ Xscale is FAST.

The palm does have downsides... The sync software is terrible (mentioned in the article), their customer service SUCKS, and devices previous to the Treo 650 are NOT flash based--you lose your battery and backup battery, and you lose your information. They needed to upgrade to flash memory a LONG time ago.

Basically, a palm is like a Mac with a good application base. It's intuitive, stylish, and it "just works". It doesn't always have bleeding edge stuff, but it does everything it's designed for, and there are programs to do almost anything you need. Every PocketPC I used crashed repeatedly and had severe stability issues.

Well, while it's on-topic -- recently I've been following TCPMP for PalmOS, and it's pretty impressive. It's still beta, but it works well (on any ARM-based PalmOS device), and plays a great number of file formats. One of its plugins is based on ffmpeg, so pretty much any file format anyone might care about (including Vorbis) is playable, except for Windows Media Audio -- and I doubt many slashdotters really care about wma. Oh, and it's open-source, of course. Anyway, homepage. Navigation is on the left, don't get fooled into thinking there's nothing there ;)

I believe the site CoreCodec (http://www.corecodec.org/) specializes as an A/V-specific SourceForge.

NOTE: SourceForge is owned by the same parent company as Slashdot, OSDN.

I'm not certain about the software I use, pocket-tunes's ability to stream formats other than mp3. It will play ogg's but I've had no success in getting a stream to work. I'm unaware of an AAC+ plugin for pocket-tunes, but tcpmp, a young but rapidly growing open source media player for palm, with play the files. I'm certain streaming is in the works.

You can play oggs on the Treo650 using the opensource player TCPMP http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/.

I believe there are 4 gig SD cards out now - the Treo650 supports SD cards. Using the SmartMovie converter I'm reducing DVD quality captured TV shows to less than 60 megs per 1/2 hour.

The playback quality is incredible and surprisingly viewable.

Hm. Tell that to all of the Treo650 owners who are going this. Have you every tried it? Believe it or not it's actually surprisingly watchable.

The file size quotes others are posting are also way off. Check out http://www.lonelycatgames.com/mobile/smartmovie/sm artmovie.html for a converter that works great (SmartMovie) and this for a great player (http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/)

I use WinTV USB2 to capture the dailyshow at night, run it throw SmartMovie and copy it to my 1 gig SD card. A 1/2 hour show is reduced to about 40 - 60 megabytes in a about 10 minutes - depending upon the quality I want. At 60 megs it's incredible.

This also works incredibly well for other talk shows (tavis smiley, the sunday morning political shows, etc.).

I think Apple needs to bit the bullet and support video on a future iPod - if they don't they'll be left behind.

Odds are it has a headphone jack. Should play mp3 files without issue. Older versions of pocketpc had to hack back in media player to support mp3 format, but I doubt that is an issue anymore.

Though I use a PocketPC, I still like to avoid Windows Media. Instead, I use these tools for a nearly perfect experience:

PocketDivXEncoder is a wonderful tool, using mencoder to encode video to PDA-sized mpeg-4. Lots of options for video (including rotation) and audio, but not enough to be confusing. More importantly, audio and video stays in sync, I can estimate file size before encoding, and it supports multiple resolutions to support more than one platform.

For playback, I use BetaPlayer, a very capable (and GPL!) video player, with excellent mpeg-4 support. Full speed playback on my older 300MHz Toshiba e355 device, and it doesn't even kill my battery. Excellent support on the CoreCodec BetaPlayer Forum.

On a nearly daily basis, I use TyTool to extract last night's Daily Show from my Tivo as a 480x480 mpeg-2, then use PocketDivXEncoder to convert it to a ~64MB 320x240 mpeg4 file. Extraction, converting the .ty to mpeg-2, and encoding to mpeg-4 takes about 12 minutes on my A64 2800. I don't bother to edit out the ads, since it's very easy to skip them in BetaPlayer. Before I found this, I rarely touched my PDA. This is most certainly the KILLER APP for me.

Hmm, funny thing is, I've been working on an open source wavelet based video codec for the last four years or so. And even funnier is that I believe if you check over at Doom9, there's yet another one going around there too.

What do I use it for? What do I NOT use it for?!

reading ebooks every single day... in bed, on the couch, on the can: uBook
keeping track of miscellaneous bits of info (eg, project shopping lists): Noterrific
Listening to my MP3 collection, via earphones, over WLAN, while reading in bed: BetaPlayer
scientific calculator: Calc98
Getting online (via T-mo GSM phone & Bluetooth) anytime, anywhere. (In other words, I have Yahoo Yellow Pages in my pocket.)
All of my contacts and appointments kept in sync with home & work desktops: organizer software is built in but I bought Pocket Informant
Various games, of course
Keeping track of how much I spend on lunch: Pocket Excel
Taking notes in meetings: PhatPad
Storing every single number and password that plagues my life in a secure format: eWallet

Sure, it isn't as good as a laptop, but I can (and do) take it everywhere.

I am upgrading to one of the new VGA models shortly after they hit the streets. I have my eye on the Dell Axim X50V, which has specs similar to the HP 4700, but is less expensive.

I can't imagine not owning a nice PDA.

Did you try the zlib compressor (aswell as the mszh one) in high compress mode? I remember trying the TSCC one a while back, and found the compression wasn't as good as the LCL/zlib one.

Another thing to check is to make sure the animation is also converted down to 8 bit mode (256c). Saving in 24bit color when only a few colours are needed will add a significant amount of redundant data to the file. The editor I use - Videomach - can decrease color depth to 8 bit when saving out AVIs.

Either way, both LCL and TSCC seem to beat the CorePNG codec.

Aparently you've never heard of CorePNG.

Ignoring lossless compression, (which has come a long way.. check out CorePNG if you're interested) even HDTV doesn't use 4 bytes of color per pixel.
4:2:2 is the most common sampling format for HDTV, which greatly reduces the required bitrate.
Still, even 100mbps would be a huge improvement over typical high-def bitrates, and you can store a whole lot of 100mbps footage on a 1TB disc.

Heck around here I hear tons of people calling their tower "the hard drive". If I talked about partions they'd probably think I was talking about PCI cards. At least the ones that have SEEN an open case before.

As for me, I could install linux for gaming, but I don't, and lack of games and other fun apps is the main reason I'm still on windows. Why don't I install it? Because I know better. Every so often I try this, and then it's fight with some soundcard or video driver, or try and get something to compile, etc. Then it's back to IRC to hear "RTFM." "OMG N00B! Go back to MS!" "STFW or read the man pages." (like I haven't tried this before even showing up). Occasionally I'll almost get some help and then wind up somewhere along the lines of "Ok now go vi the make file. Search for appname\etc\conf\rc\too\many\damn\levels\autoconf and then look for the one with -j 17 but not -q 4, then change the IP to the broadcast of your subnet... what do you mean it won't go? No of course arrow keys don't make an editor go down to the next line, who would think such a stupid thing? Of course backspace doesn't erase what's behind it, that would be retarded. Anyway, once you get there just recompile the dependencies and fetch the two packages the newspost mentioned and recompile. Then update your drivers and recompile the other one." If I complain about the obscurity or bad design of anything I get labeled a moron and further help is withheld. I mean obviously I must be a moron if you can't remember the 273 custom switches and arguments for the 81 commands I need to use to get the thing to work, plus all the regular expression rules and the multiple scripting languages, right?

I grew up using DOS. I still prefer the command line over a GUI for many things. I've theorized, designed, and coded an open source fractal-wavelet based video codec from scratch by myself (shameless plug and desperate plea for dev/debugging help). I've been playing games so long I started out at arcades standing on a milk crate so I could reach. If linux gaming isn't even getting me interested, something's not there, and sorry but I don't think it's me that's the problem. Just my opinion.

Even when it does work, once the novelty of "Wow I'm playing a 3 year old game everyone's already bored of... on linux!" wears off, you go "Hmm, what else can I play? Lemme reboot." and then once you're back in windows you never think to yourself "Oops, gotta reboot to linux for that." You just play the games there, they work, and there's no reason to boot back.

There might be another one if someone would help me fix and finish it.