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PocketPC 2003 Reviewed
Sander Sassen writes "Prior to the official launch of the Microsoft PocketPC 2003 platform next Monday, Hardware Analysis puts an Asus MyPal a620 PocketPC to the test and details what new features PocketPC 2003 brings to the table and whether it is worth it to upgrade from 2002."
Why don't they make a pocket pc with the Ipod harddrive inside?
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Good 'ol slashdot.
Or are you just glad to see me? Oh wait, it's Slashdot, must be a PocketPC.
I just wish somebody would add wireless networking to the things already like they did with the tablet PCs. Those are sweet.
The changes for the end user are going to be rather small. The changes for the developers who are going to move to .NET tools for PocketPC programming rather than the hacked versions of VS6 we are using now is going to be a larger change.
Is PocketPC 2k3 Xscale optimized?
That's really the million dollar question. PocketPC 2002 is not, and it's a real shame, because it hurts the performance of those 400mhz Xscale CPU's pretty badly.
Check out mram and other technologies that will replace flash, RAM, and even CPU cache. Harddrives are noisy and power intensive. Far from an elegant solution.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The article lists the price as
Price: +/- 350 dollar, 329 euro
I assume they use "+/-" to mean approxiamately. If not, I'll choose the -$350 option and you can pay me to use this thing.
In fact it is more like a review of the Asus MyPal a620 Pocket PC. I was expecting to see the detail of new features in the new OS, but it only tells me about the new media player and not much else. I am more interested about the performance of the new OS, as it is supposed to be optimized for the Xscale CPU. By the way, the MyPal Pocket PC has a terrible name and is very ugly, don't you think? I think the Taiwanese manufacturers should hire some better designers.
Yes it is, but no benchmark has been published yet so I have no idea how good the optimization is. Developers must rewrite their applications for Pocket PC 2003 in order to take advantage of the optimizations. The review kinda sucks because it tells us nothing about the performance.
Just use familiar with opie. You'll be happier, and have more spare change to buy things that matter.
As a network connection will most likely also be used for web browsing Microsoft completely revamped the rendering architecture of the PocketPC Internet Explorer which not only speeds thing up considerably but also offers support for more internet standards. Standards that are now available in PocketPC 2003 are XHTML, CSS, HTML 4.0, JavaScript 5.5, WAP 2.0, WTLS, IPv6 and many more, which makes the PocketPC web browser compatible with the vast majority of websites found on the internet and intranets which often use some of the more exotic protocols.
All I can say is ABOUT TIME! I don't even bother trying to do any web browsing on my Dell Axim X5 running Pocket PC 2002. It's just disgusting that they have an IE 3.x based browser running on something so new!
I wonder if we'll see any upgrades to the browser for Pocket PC 2002, or if we will need to purchase a new device with 2003 on it. Let me guess...
Huh I thought Pocket PC 2003 has been out for awhile because at work we've been selling a Toshiba E760 (which looks to be a E755 running Pocket PC 2003) for over a week now... I hadn't been keeping up on Pocket PC OS stuff very much so I didn't think anything of it when they came in... Of course once I saw the article I went to Toshiba's website & realized they don't even mention it... Huh, I wonder how fast I'd be fired if I wrote a review of it for the slashdot crowd & posted it tomorrow..
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I still use my orginal PocketPC, and am quite content with it. I am guessing about 80% of the people never actually had a REAL NEED to upgrade from PocketPC
Most people never actually had a real need to upgrade from paper and pencil. But we did it anyways. Why? Technological innovation makes certain tasks easier and certain situations more enjoyable. Pocket PC 2003 will be no different. There are many things (for both developers and end users) that it will make easier and more enjoyable. Whether it's suitable for you is simply a question of whether these things are important to you. I'd hold off until full reviews of the changes surface before making that decision.
Page 1 says "Mircrosoft" will launch the thing, and "thereâ(TM)s some changes"
According to page 2, 2.5G is now "fully supported a offers GSM suspend/resume" while meanwhile, "on the multimedia site of things..."
Page 5 tells us there are "a few welcome extraâ(TM)s" and "we clocked between 10 till 12 hours on the battery..."
Quick, somebody make this guy a Slashdot editor!
I play Nerd-Folk!
I just got a Toshiba e355 and like the article says, it includes windows media player 9. The biggest thing for me anyway, is that pressing the home button brings up Home Version 2.00 with a games tab, a programs tab, a main tab and a running tab. The running tab makes it much much easier to actually close programs. I haven't noticed much else different between 2003 and 2002(I used to have an HP1910 until it stopped syncing and Best Buy replaced it with this three days ago.)
And for any wondering about the Toshiba e355, I can transfer files fine using Synce
And here are some specs for it.
From the article "On the multimedia site of things Microsoft has wisely adapted Media Player 9 for the PocketPC 2003 platform, offering even smaller file sizes and smoother playback.
And I heard from MS developers that they were gonna drop Media Player 9 on the PocketPC and go solely with QuickTime.
Next we'll read that MS has wisely adapted pocket versions od Word and Excel rather than WordPerfect and 123.
I'm a CS major and recently switched from a Palm to an iPaq. Microsoft's PDA OS is so much better than Palm's, it's hard to imagine using anything else. At first I thought the $500 price tag was outrageous, but it has helped with my studies and organization tremendously. Bash MS all you want, but their PDA OS is by far the most versitile on the market today.
Previously on Slashdot it was mentioned that Palm DocumentsToGo did MS Office compatibility better than PocketPC software. If this hasn't improved, other features may not matter.
Microsoft should know better by now that Office is top priority.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
to upgrade the os on an older pocket pc? I just bought a new Dell Axim and would very much like to install Pocket PC 2003. Also, I would settle on just being able to install the updated version of IE, cause the one on there now sucks.
SIGFAULT
You can add the PCMCIA jacket to an ipaq and insert a PCMCIA harddrive into it. Alternatively, there is a Pocket PC from UR There with a PCMCIA slot built-in. Either way the device would be too big to be Pocketable.
I'll bite :-)
:-)
IE isn't standards compliant because it breaks several W3C standards and doesn't support many of the standards it implements properly. That's a fact I'm afraid. Whether or not the behaviour in IE should be standard is up for debate (though I choose Moz).
IE isn't too bad, outstanding issues which make it a pain in the arse include:
1) Bollocks PNG support. Alpha channel support needs a custom tag (DXImage filter or something similar).
2) CSS box model, width includes margins/padding size.
3) Doesn't support absolute positioning without width/height size: e.g.
top: 100px;
bottom: 100px;
width: 100%;
will result in a box 0px (unless there's content in which case it's the content height) and 100% wide. In mozilla and compliant broswers it is a box 100px from the top of the window to 100px from the bottom.
4) Background positioning from a origin doesn't work (see CSS/Edge for a demo, link is on mozilla.org/start/1.0).
5) CSS 2 content generation support is nonexistant. CSS 2 support in general is hit and miss.
6) No support for W3C event system.
7) Lots of other small issues which slip my mind at present
Lists of CSS support/bugs tend to be fairly easy to find on the net though many are a little out of date.
Opacity is in the upcoming CSS3 standard, which Mozilla is helping test. Thus, it was prefixed with moz- to specify that it wasn't in a full-fledged standard.
Actually, a bug was found in CSS2 because of Mozilla's strict standards support (see Netscape's development documents on images in a table for more info).
The nice thing about Mozilla is that its extensions tend to be obvious. TMK, all Mozilla off-standard stuff is recognizable as such, as you have so aptly demonstated (note the "moz-" prefix). Unlike Other Browsers which implement their extensions in unrecognizable fashion (e.g. MARQUEE tag).
Anyhow, you're not talking about not supporting standards, you're talking of adding to the stuff out there (and note that I've shown that Mozilla is being a good citizen in this respect!). For supporting existing W3C standards, nothing is better than Mozilla, and IE falls far short. Example: DOM level 2 compliance, esp. wrt. event handling.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
IE5/Mac Supports all of these, and it supports them well.
All I was saying is that the parent poster should distinguish IE/Mac and IE/Win, since they are different products and they have wildly different levels of standards support.
Pardon the typos, I'm extremely drunk.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Actually Microsoft has gone to great lengths in order to not break compatability with many products. This has also made many products (eg Windows) weaker. Thats why you can still run 10 year old windows software on windows xp.
Will I be able to upgrade my iPAQ H3870 or is HP/Compaq going to be retards and make me buy a new handheld if I want it?
ummmm RTFA? last paragraph of the summary and conclusion here:
"Overall, the Asus MyPal a620 proved to be an excellent PocketPC, with great battery life, easily making it through a full day of extensive use and hours of multimedia playback. On average we clocked between 10 till 12 hours on the battery, which is a little more than weâ(TM)ve seen from popular PocketPC 2002 devices. If youâ(TM)re in the market for an affordable, yet powerful and versatile, PocketPC be sure to give the Asus MyPal a620 a serious consideration."
Can it run non-Microsoft apps?
.NET there are now other possibllities too.
I've run Perl under pocketpc OS. I've heard that Apache, and Python will also run there. There's a java VM for pocketpc. With mono and
Most people never actually had a real need to upgrade from paper and pencil.
And indeed most people never have upgraded from paper and pencil to PDAs.
Although I agree with you in general about IE and standards, moving from pocketPC 2002 to pocketPC 2003 is moving from IE 3.0 to IE 6.0 and by any measure, there is a huge improvement in standards support between those two versions. Try writing an ECMAscript or DOM app with Jscript (not even JavaScript) and you'll know what I mean.
and the Terminal Services Client. My hardware DB(access, so its just barely a DB) is resident on the card. With that I have everything I need to support servers in 7 national and 4 international data centers, serving some 8 to 9 million email recipients. Now if someone could make WebSphere and a terminal server play nice I'd be golden :)
I agree with you in theory on apps though....Most of our clients could in reality still be on the mainframe with 3270 connectivity and text email, but human nature being what it is...ooooo loook NEW PRETTY LIGHTS and BUZZERS....Droooool
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Tiny computers running Windows are not a good idea, when I get upset at them there isn't anything to prevent me from throwing them out a real window...
(to quoteth my brother)
forma3