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Ask Slashdot: Best Software To Revive PocketPCs With Windows Mobile 5-6?
An anonymous reader writes I recently got my hands on some amazing (at their time) pieces of technology, PocketPCs from the 2005-2007 era. All run with Windows Mobile 5 or 6, have storage SD cards (up to 4GB), 300 to 600 MHz ARM CPUs and 64-124MB of RAM/ROM. GPS chip is Sirf STAR III. I want to know what software you would install on them. Maybe a good Linux with GUI - if anyone can point on how to make it work. Creating some apps myself would be nice, but dunno where to start for WM5. One of my ideas was to use them as daily organizer / shopping list / memory games for people that don't own smartphones. So if anyone remembers such apps, I'd appreciate a reference. Tips or ideas for memory training or smart games are also highly welcomed. The power within these toys is simply unused and it's a shame!
Is software for old Windows Mobile devices still available? maybe you can find some on eBay? Wish I could help you out more. Good luck on trying to find some software.
A device from 8 years ago is ancient. Just let it go. If you want to play with it for a sense of nostalgia, don't let me stop you, but don't foist that trash on anyone else.
Sell each on eBay to enthusiasts such as yourself. Then use the profits to purchase a real smartphone.
if you want Linux.
use them as bait and put the port they connect to in Mirror mode, are they attacked from inside the USA or from China? what are they used for DDOS or spam? I bet the bad guys have more software for WinCE than the public still does.
There were some community ports of linux to compaq ipaq series pocketpcs of that era, one of which is "Familiar linux".
http://www.smartphonemag.com/c...
There were also some efforts to port early android builds in the Froyo family, but i cant seem to dredge any up at the moment.
These devices are a tad dated, but I could see them being used as a fancy IR remote control, and a few other things.
You could use landfill-Linux, the right distro for that hardware !
I actually looked into this earlier this year. I pulled 30 iPaq of various flavors out of a medical clinic as part of an upgrade. What I found was actually pretty grim. There was a NetBSD port for them, but it hasn't been maintained in years. Many of the tools used to build the images are just dead links now. Same with the Linux distros that are supposed to work on them. Hours of staring at 404 screens. I eventually gave up and recycled them.
I had one of the original Casio Cassiopeia Pocket PC's. I remember thinking that it was the best thing ever. I could walk around with information in my pocket. Even had the network card with the dongle for reading my email. Had a 1GB IBM Micro Drive to expand the storage and play music in the car. I remember trying to install Linux on it at one point. Was only halfway successful and then the device bricked and never came back on. It was a great device at the time. But that was 15 years ago.
are best left dead, WM, WinCE are 2 of them. Set them on fire, piss on them to put them out, then have fun by throwing them 1 by 1 into a wood chipper and get a good nights sleep knowing you just did the world a solid.
the only possible use i could see for them is for a cheap satnav, assuming they even have a GPS module.
If you really want to tinker with that old technology, why don't you start out right by making it useful? Install Linux on it. It's too slow for Android, but you could try Firefox OS on it. Then you wouldn't be wasting your time learning an api for a dead OS.
If it still boots Windows, I think you used to be able to get the SDK and IDE from Microsoft for free I bought one of those a long time back, and wrote some kind of Access database based checkbook balancing app on it. It worked great for about a week, before it crashed and irreparably corrupted the database. Then I stuck the thing in a drawer for a couple of years, after which the battery would no longer hold a charge. Why don't you just get a smart phone?
Debian works nice on N900. GPRS works with ofono. That should be good place to start. (Or you can still use Maemo). http://elinux.org/N900
I've coded for those WM5/6 mobile devices using .NET Compact Framework, using C#. You might think these things are beyond use, but they're suprisingly capable. We still use ruggedised WM6 devices in warehouses as there still isn't a good cheap alternative.
So coding for them is simple enough, but the underlying OS has a pretty horrible UI by today's standards.
AxDroid project to bring Android to the Dell Axim line. I had an Axim x50v and it was a nice little computer at the time, but I wouldn't want to use it today.
You should have used the wayback machine.
I found familiar-linux's git repository in there, circa 2008.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
They also have the prebuilt packages in there (wayback machine), but you have to dig those out yourself.
i had 9 of those smartphone / pocket-pc style devices back at the time: the absolute best one was the HTC Universal, as it was more like a hand-held clamshell laptop with built-in 3G. you _used_ to be able to get information about them on handhelds.org but we coordinated through #htc-linux (since taken over by android dummies) and used wiki.xda-developers.com (since taken over by android wannabe modders). [note to xda-developer forum users: i may be being slightly unfair though about the android dummies and wannabes: i apologise in advance to any of you that aren't so stupid as to be able to find and pay attention long enough to read slashdot :) ]
so you're going to have to dig... and you'll almost certainly need to begin with the 2.6 era linux kernel tree, which should give you a very very big hint about what you face, here. to give you an example: the fastest i've ever been able to reverse-engineer linux onto a device was 3 weeks and that was because it already had a [GPL-violating] linux kernel on it, where they had left some clues around and it was possible to poke around in /proc.
beyond that, the fastest i managed - and i could not get PM/wakeup to work because i could not locate the correct RAM/device re-initialisation parameters - was six to eight weeks on the HTC/Compaq Ipaq, i believe it was called the hw6915.
beyond _that_, the _longest_ i ever heard someone taking (and this was because it was worth it) to get full driver functionality was THREE YEARS, and that was for the HTC Universal (aka O2 "XDA III").
please please DO NOT underestimate how much work it takes to do reverse-engineering. these handhelds are actually far more complex pieces of kit, in engineering and in software terms, than any laptop or desktop PC you've ever encountered. the HTC Universal had SEVEN audio output paths for example, and over four audio input paths. there were over 110 GPIO pins on its Intel PXA ARM processor, but these were nowhere near enough, so they had to use an external GPIO IC (we called it ASIC3). but... they actually ran out of GPIO pins on that *as well*, so they ended up utilising the 16 pins of GPIO on the Ericsson 3G GSM modem (only contactable over USB!) in order to control some of the functions such as camera light.
so in many ways you are actually better off designing (and paying to have made) your own device. that is not a joke, in the slightest bit. it will take you less time and will cost you less in lost earnings from having to work full-time on the reverse-engineering. and before you splutter in disbelief, there are people who have done exactly that: Dr Schaeller did the GTA04 fairly recently (fits into a Neo FreeRunner case), and in that way he at least got to pick a) a modern-ish processor b) the best components that were available c) he got CONTROL OVER THE DEVICE DRIVERs, and he didn't have to _guess_ what the GPIO maps and memory maps are.
basically, what i'm trying to say is that if you cannot find a pre-existing project (you didn't mention what devices you actually have) that has done the reverse-engineering, unless you are actually thinking of learning reverse-engineering as a useful specialist marketable skill, either throw those devices into landfill, give them to someone who doesn't mind winceouch, or break them down for parts and sell the components on ebay. check beforehand to make sure that they're desirable parts of course.
of course... i say "throw them into landfill", which is directly and vehemently against our social responsibility, but unfortunately when actually buying these devices we make selfish decisions, not socially responsible ones, not least because they *aren't any alternatives*. now http://phonebloks.com/ is looking to change that in the smartphone space, and i'm looking to change that in the everything-else-device arena (starting here https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...)
We had developed an app for them (which didn't move very well, although it did win a Control Engineering award). A few months ago, we tossed everything as our cubes were being reformatted.
I have one of the few Toshiba PocketPC's with the HiDPI screen (was only released in Japan and Canada, not the US) and it lasted quite a while, but this was before the devices switched to NAND storage, so everything was gone when the battery dies. These could make a comeback as a "secure" device, but other than that, it's a pointless endeavor to try and salvage them. They just don't have enough internal storage to put anything useful on them. Running entirely off the SD card/CompactFlash slot (mine has both) isn't an option because you need one of those slots to store things on, and the other to run your io device that you bought the device for.
If it wasn't for the WiFi part burning out (802.11b) I might have wanted to tinker with it more, but ultimately it sits in a box.
I owned two PocketPC devices back in 1999. They ran linux horribly, and sucked at everything else. I can say one thing for sure: SELL THEM. I'm pretty sure you could get $20-40 for each of them. When you're done with that, buy a no contract ZTE Zinger and don't activate it, normally $40, but at one time they were $10. YES $10 without a contract:
http://slickdeals.net/f/733309...
I own 2 of them as backups to my Nexus 5. Best dirt cheap phone ever. Dual core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon 200, 512M ram, near stock Android 4.4.2. Even Google Earth runs reasonably well.
Agreed. Maybe they can be recycled or used "for fun" but trying to make them useful for people without smartphones is probably going to take far more time and effort than it's worth. You can get off-contract Android or Windows Phone devices for $50 that are FAR more powerful and have a vast array of current software available. Trying to reinvent the wheel with a PDA from 2005 instead of a smartphone from 2011 is more of a hobby tinkering project that something that anyone else will find useful.
*Also remember battery issues -- these devices will have old batteries that may not charge well and finding replacements may not be easy.
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
Microsoft has intentionally made their mobile devices expire after a few years.
They have done it with every iteration of their mobile platform from Windows CE all the way to Windows Phone.
It works like this:
1. Buy our new mobile device! It's amazing! It does everything and we'll support it forever and ever, we promise! It's okay, go ahead and put all of your contacts and data on our devices. What could possibly go wrong?
2. New generation of our mobile platform is out! Buy our mobile devices! It's amazing! Oh and also we're dropping support for existing devices tomorrow and closing the app store. You will never receive another software update and your old device is now a brick. But new platform!
They did this with Windows CE, Windows Mobile 1 through 6 and they'll do it with Windows Phone.
They even had a phone that was entirely cloud based in Europe and when they shuttered the cloud service the device literally refused to boot.
EMC2, now renamed linuxcnc
Strap that obsolete brick to the bed of the milling machine, and get linuxcnc to drill right through it, say 50 times, just to be sure.
Ignoring all the people advocating A) Linux or B) Trash 'em you can turn them into decent little shopping list gadgets for people if they have decent battery life still. Avoid anything that requires Internet or other connections at all - just turn off any wireless, etc. becasue you may not have the battery for it anyway and you certainly don't have the software/updates.
HandyShopper was a great program for Palm and Windows Mobile back in the day, is free and still available: http://chrisant.home.comcast.net/~chrisant/hs3/hs3.htm
It's most useful for people who shop at multiple stores, because one of the useful features is tracking pricing for the same item across stores and showing you when it's cheaper elsewhere.
fencepost
just a little off
The power within these toys is simply unused and it's a shame!
The power within those toys is pathetic, based on the fact that $30 will get you something newer which runs Android and which has more CPU and RAM. Throw those fucking things away. All of the environments for them are dead, Familiar linux is based on OpenEmbedded which is a goddamned nightmare to build, just drop them into the recycling at the landfill and buy something newer.
With that said, if you have an absolute shitload of them, the fact that they have a halfway decent (which I think adequately describes STAR III) GPS chip suggests that you should do something GPS-related with them. The problem is, the GPS isn't very good by modern standards (even cheap phones will use GLONASS as well now) and the battery life will be atrocious.
Those devices are dead, and all the software for them is dead or dying, you will waste a lot of time just dealing with their problems and if you don't manage to find another OS which will run on them, WINCE UGH WINCE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://axdroid.wikia.com/wiki/... However it looks like nothing has happened for years... I own an Axim X51v and would like to give it a second life.
Perl Programmer for hire
Tiny Core Linux would most likely work on the PocketPC. I run it on a Pentium 1 (120 MHz) and 64 MB RAM ThinkPad 365XD. Also, I run it on a Dell Evo n800c with Pentium 2 (300 MHz) and 128 MHz RAM.
Tiny Core has a full installation with LibreOffice & other office application, Firefox/Seamonkey/other browsers, networking, etc.
Maybe, just maybe they might be useful if you can develop WinCE apps for them. No, I wouldn't waste time with anything too complicated. But.. if you are in to building one-off hardware projects and if the devices have any usable sort of IO (maybe a serial port that could be connected to a microcontroller with lots of GPIOs) you might be able to use them as one-off control interfaces for something or other. I wouldn't go any deeper than programming by dragging controls into place, sending commands out the serial port upon events. Anything more complicated isn't worth it, buy something newer. Changing the OS.. if you can find something where someone has already ported Linux to your device specifically with step-by step instructions then sure. You will probably need to use the Wayback Machine. Beyond that.. not worth it.
There was an amazing XCOM or Ufo - the enemy unknown port on one of these, with reworked controls that matched stylus screen perfectly. Available on sourceforge or some place. There was a decent chess proggy too.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Sorry few others here seem to see the value in finding a function for still-useful technology that you probably picked up for free.
Up until a couple years ago I used an old WM6 device as a streaming internet radio player. Perfect function for it, as it remained plugged in and so battery life was never a concern, and it meant rarely having to interface with the device (which was of course clonky and sluggish by today's standards).
Another possible use which I recently stumbled upon is using them as baby monitors. No idea if there are dedicated apps for this for WM, but it sounds like you might be willing to create one yourself, which is great (and if you do, I hope you share it). This is actually a brilliant use for old smartphones because:
1. many of the dedicated solutions on the market use analog transmission (which results in static) or, if digital, are quite expensive ($100+)
2. they can remain plugged in so battery life isn't an issue
3. it's not really an issue if the phone's screen is cracked
4. they can potentially interface with someone's current smartphone, which they probably have close-at-hand anyway
www.gaiageek.com
Courtesy of integrated Windows Media Player (WMP), these devices can play Windows Media Video (WMV) at native screen resolution. If they are network attached, you could have VLC on a desktop machine transcoding video to WMV3/WMA and making it accessible via an MMSH transport. Might be useful as a cam monitor, etc.
For your sanity, configure one of the hardware buttons to launch WMP w/ the server address so there is no futzing with the stylus oriented GUI when you want to use it.
That is what you should do with them. Paperweights and door stops And this is coming from a guy that collects "old stuff". These have no collector value, nor any 'geek value' to hack on. Plenty of current hardware out there that you can get for nearly nothing that wont be a nightmare to work with.
If you MUST do something with them or you turn into a toad or something, NetBSD should run. But, why?
If your goal is sustainable re-use, I think it's a waste of time to force-fit linux on them. (Better options for same device) Instead, merely reset them with the original OS, apps and games, pre-tuned to the hardware. Our firm standardized on late-model Toshiba/Audiovox Windows Pocket PC smartphones with faster processors. When we moved the cell-phone carrier accounts and issued newer platforms, our users wanted to keep them because the built-in MP3/AVI player and SD card slot was simpler to use/manage than dedicated MP3-Players because it was file-based. I watched users with the newer phones whip out the old pocket pc to use multi-variable formulas they set up in Excel Spreadsheets. You could still use Word or Notepad for shopping lists, excel to estimate board-feet at the hardware store and store your files on SD-cards, which are still sold in stores and still readable by desktop PCs. More importantly, with your battery at 10% remaining, you could still play MP3s, Solitaire or Bubbles with impunity because, in your OTHER pocket, you had your newer phone!
In theory I have 0.8.4 of GPE and OPIE for H22xx devices, and HaRET 0.3.4 for booting it. If someone would like that, it is not very large and I could arrange to upload it someplace. I say "In theory" because I have no way to test these files besides unpacking the archives.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
htc kaiser second hand 50 quid
Google maps and opera web browser. Made it a perfectly useful gadget. Gps lock a little slow but fine once going.
Otherwise perhaps a wifi sip voip phone? Could be handy for cheap calls. There was software to make it a mifi wifi 3g hotspot but it cost money...
I broke the screen and now have a 50 quid zte android 2.3 mobile. Still use opera and google maps. Experience is much the same. However try to set up the internet on a windows mobile and you will quickly see why the iphone one. Its a total nightmare.
think there was gpe for the htc universal it booted but the phone side didn't work one thing it did have was slide to unlock :) you dragged a key to the lock.
haret and z3 i think sound familiar.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
HaRET was I think the most common loader for booting Linux from WinCE. I had (probably still have) the Sandisk 128MB CF+WiFi, I believe I stored my kernel and initrd on that and then had ext2 on my SD card. The H22xx series had both SD and CF, though it was pre-SDHC and also had only 3.3v CF as you would expect from a handheld. Once Linux booted I could only use the WiFi on the Sandisk card, though supposedly the driver will let you use both at once in more recent versions of the kernel — whatever will actually run on that, anyway.
I don't remember having to do any wacky configs, just basic: point at the files. But it's been a long, long time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
linux on htc universal
www.unilinux.4fan.cz
7 options including android
openmoko , opie qtopia i think were the ones i played with there is debian (tchy).
how much works i have no idea, but you can get a few applications working and a gui.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
actually it might have been the toshiba e740 /e750 that i was thinking of and your right its been a long long time.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I had a pair of clients who were primate researchers. In late 2006 they went into the Tanzanian bush with a bunch of Dell Axim X5s, which we chose over the sleeker, more modern X50s because of the lower price and the availability at the time of a superb third party aluminum case. The differences between the X5 and X50 were mainly skin-deep; a chunkier PDA was actually a bit nicer to use in the field.
They carried the computers and PDAs along with a sophisticated solar-powered field biology lab to their research site via motorized canoe, then by native bearers -- just like in the old Tarzan movies. Then I didn't hear from for two and a half years, except for a message that bandits had stolen their stuff and could we send replacement hardware, which we did. I was very gratified to learn that the data backup procedures I recommended worked -- that the principal investigators always carry an SD card with an up-to-date backup of all the expedition data on their persons. Previous experience supporting field researchers in Africa suggested that anything not nailed down was bound to disappear over the course of two years.
When they returned in 2009, they were agog. They'd gone into the bush with the most advanced consumer technology available. When they came back nobody was carrying PDAs anymore, there were iPhones everywhere. The left before the iPhone was announced and returned after everybody had one, and when they saw the user interface, there were staggered. They were like Rip Van Winkle waking up in a strange new world.
As for the poster's question, as a geek I totally understand it, but from a perspective of someone who actually developed for the platform professionally, there's little attraction to working with these devices when you can get an 4.3 inch Android "tablet" for under fifty dollars, and its so much more easier and more enjoyable to develop for. There was some really nice hardware built to run pocketpc, but pocketpc itself was mediocre in the extreme. I certainly tried the Linux ports that were available, but there really wasn't a compelling reason to use them, however, other than the novelty of having Unix on the palmtop. But they didn't deliver a better handheld experience (as iOS and Android do).
I'd still consider old-school hardware for sending into the bush for several reasons. The first is a removable battery. You're in the middle of a series of observations that will make your career (this often happens in field research) and your battery goes dead. So you carry a spare, which is more convenient and cost effective. The second reason is the SD card. You finish those career-making observations and head back to camp, but you drop your device into a deep, rocky gorge. With an SD or microSD card you just pop the card with your data out and it's just a minor mishap. Third, something a little more bulky than a razor-thin smartphone is better when you're chasing a troop of chimps through the jungle, your device in hand ready to record an observation at any instant.
You can of course get android devices which have the virtues of old-school hardware, but they're not mainstream -- in other words they're pricey. Back when the X5 was being manufactured, it was being sold to people to keep their address books on. And it sold by the gazillions, which meant on a unit price basis it was a bargain. Scientists often have awesome tech, but it's because they absolutely need it. They don't have money to throw at inessentials. So it was really nice to be able to load our guys up with tons of bargain consumer tech. If they busted an X5 they could just grab a spare out of the crate. It was as close to my perfect world as I believe we'll ever be, where data is priceless but hardware is disposable.
I got boxes of tech like this in my attic: Apple Newtons, Dell Axim x5s and X51s, practically every generation of Palm Pilot, very early proto-smart phones that ran "Windows CE", a ruggedized Trimble pocket pc with high accuracy DGPS built in. They all work too. And if anyone
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
NetBSD runs fine on that stat stuff. Look for NetBSD on Jornada 720 in this page, running Doom as a demo
A 5 second google returned http://www.anytux.org/hardware...
Linux compatibility for hundreds of old handhelds are on there.
That's not true. The sources for hpcarm (the port for ARM-based handheld PCs) compile and run just fine. Every version of NetBSD has hpcarm binaries (6.1.5, NetBSD-7_BETA, sources compiled from -current). I think you just don't understand how NetBSD works.
What I found was actually pretty grim. There was a NetBSD port for them, but it hasn't been maintained in years. Many of the tools used to build the images are just dead links now. Same with the Linux distros that are supposed to work on them. Hours of staring at 404 screens.
One of the benefits of not switching browsers too often and dragging your bookmarks with you is that you realize just how fragile the permanency of the web is. It is fairly grim that so many sites, even supposedly-profitable pornography, inexplicably take down your links, dmca does it for them, or the sites become domain-parked or lose maintenance. Bit rot kicks in on a resource that linked to other links, so all your leads end with 404s. And I'm talking about 3 to 5 years worth of time on STATIC sites. When it comes to forums, chan boards and even your job's corporate wiki, things have a habit of getting trashed via planned upgrades, log rotation, domain / database migrations, or whatever. The web 2.0 makes it so permalinks are not the norm anymore.
Though it's a huge problem when you're late to the party looking for yesterday's time-looted treasures, my message is to save yourself some grief with those things you have access to now, if possible. Firefox has a description field for bookmarks --use it! it is frustrating when you come back years later and have nothing more than a urlName and a foggy memory of what you may have wanted to return to, that you never did.
For downloads, save everything you install. Browsers auto-update, but as we all know, the bring pains with every release, such as inconvenient iframe policies and certificate revocation that goes a bit into a war with your safe-enough workflows. Though chrome auto-updates, Chromium forks on Windows can be had that you install in specific folders. Same for some Firefox "Nightly" or Firefox / Chromium Portable builds. Turn off auto-update, save your extensions folder once in a while...
Keep a plain old textfile with your most important non-daily bookmarks in case of browser corruption. Again, today's web is ice-thin. We're already aware that stuff is sadly brittle to find when maintainers have moved on to new shinies or even passed away without a hint.
The hardware was mostly terrible in these devices. They mostly had very low resolution resistive screens.
I'd happily pay a considerable amount, not to have to ever use WindowsCE, or this kind of hardware.
If you can still find a Linux that will run on whatever hardware you have, it might make an interesting toy, but I don't think you'd ever want to actually use the device.
Personally, I'd strip the hardware for the GPS chips, and anything else that looks useful.
The best software to revive old Hardware ? Linux.
aaaaaaa
you mean netbsd
right?
Creating some apps myself would be nice, but dunno where to start for WM5.
You might want to have a look at VS 2008 and the .NET compact framework - I seem to remember the Express (free) version of VS 2008 supports it. It's pretty easy to develop. Expect far from fast performance and no easy way to scale across screen resolutions, but it should be good enough for things like "daily organizer / shopping list / memory games".
I wouldn't bother, though - I have a couple of those devices (a Dell Axim x51v and an HP). They probably work like new, but I haven't used them for half a decade. Where to start? If the OS's horrible usability isn't enough to put you off, it isn't fun to deal with the short battery life and the proprietary, clunky connectors which made them a pain a recharge (though in all fairness, the HTC smartphones were slightly less awful). Any el-cheapo Android device runs circles around those.
Plug it in, turn on the backlight, start World Clock and use it a night light/desk clock. My HP 320LX has been doing that for 8 years or so.
Your best option without writing software is to set it up as a web kiosk and install Zetakey. It's a webkit based Modern browser that supports HTML5. The only thing it is relay missing compared with most modern browsers is tabs (at least on the WM version). The best part is this software unlike a lot of WM stuff is still in active development for rugged industrial devices a lot of which still run CE.
I've got a Dell X51V from that era. The only thing that I've though about doing with it is using it as a touchscreen for a Raspberry Pie. You could probably write an HTML frontend to cmus or some other useful application. You would then just access the Pie using the device's built-in web browser (garbage) or Opera Mini 2.x (I still have a copy). This is easiest if the device supports wifi (like my Dell) and has a cradle to hold it while it is connected to power (like my Dell).
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The Android ports all seem to have serious flaws. The Windows CE software can still be very useful, so long as running an older version makes sense. For instance, you're probably out of luck if you want to find an up-to-date browser or version of Skype, but if you want to use it as a calculator emulator, planitarium program, or gameboy emulator, you can probably find some fine programs for it.
I have a couple of them (a Dell Axim PDA and a Windows Tilt 2 smartphone), but I just gave up on making anything useful out of them. The primary problem is that for all the cool uses that exist, very few are not better-served by simply using your smartphone. That said, there are still a few possible uses that I have thought of:
1) An MP3 player for situations where your smartphone would be inappropriate (only problem here is the DAC in most of these phones suck, so probably won't work well hooked up to a $10,000 A/V system.
2) A networked security camera.
3) Give it to a child to play games and tinker around with (one who isn't going to be getting a smartphone for a while).
4) An exchange server display (many of these still sync fine with exchange)
5) An Alarm Clock (they display time, date, weather, et cetera).
My kids still like playing on mine. I have simcity 2000, monopoly, battleship, lemonade stand, HHGG text based game, etc.
Actually ZetaKey is a pretty good modern WebKit HTML5 browser for Windows Mobile that is still actively supported. It targeted for rugged devices that still use WinCE, but will work OK on any Win Mobile 5+ device. So you can use it as a UI for anything browser based.
I have a MWG Zinc II running WinMo 6.1 Pro. It was my daily driver phone for a long time thanks to my CelioCorp RedFly (http://www.racoindustries.com/celio-corp.htm).
It was surprising how effective the little phone became once hooked up the redfly. I was able to view documents/web pages full size, SSH'ing into my servers was no longer painful..
Currently it is used as a quick and dirty SSH terminal. But I have plans to write some .NET CF code for around the house.