Pocket PCing....

[admin]

I have been messing with the Pocket PC a lot, whether it be for leisure or for school.

For school I have gone paperless with this damned thing!! I have two clarsees that require some serious arse note taking, Sociology and Ethics.

At first i would use the stylus to take down the notes. I still used Graffiti, or something like Graffiti, ah hell, its Graffiti only they dont call it that on the PPC, its Block- Recognizer. But after a few weeks my hand would hurt because the stylus was so thin. So then I started reading up on All in One Stylus Pens over at www.aximsite.com, reviews and such.

I finally decided on this bad boy.
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/030313/051947i.html

Stylus, Pen, Laser Pointer, and LED. Kick arse, cept, I used the crap out of the laser and light the first week and killed the batteries, expensive arse watch batteries, 2.99 each, and it takes four. So i have yet to get the batteries, the pen was 13 bucks so the batteries will equal out to a whole new pen. Maybe i should buy a new pen when the batteries die?

Anyway, this thing made taking my notes kick arse. Plus if you saw the pic, its silver just like the Axim. I was doing great with this, and Word was doing me good, until i needed to see documents with Tables. It would not render them properly, or not at all. So I installed Textmaker 2002 http://www.softmaker.de/tmp_en.htm, this App looks and feels just like Word for the desktop, but it was memory hungry! So i used it for awhile and finally removed it. If i had a document with tables i needed to see later i would save it as Webpage and use IE to view it. I do miss the ease of numbering and bulleting of Textmaker though.

So then as the notes taking got more intense I started seeing the need for a keyboard. I have one for the Palm. So I started looking for a thumbkeyboard, since they are small. But then i went on down to the local Office Depot and found this guy: http://www.pocketop.net/

got it clearanced because it did not have the stand. But i dont really need it, i just switch to landscape view and rest the Axim on the Dell case it came with. And on a note on the Landscape view, it is not a feature that comes with PPCs, but i had installed the drivers for this keyboard awhile back just to have Landscape funtionality, so when i got the board it worked right away.

So now note taking is a breeze,and i get oohs and aahs from students and from my professors.

Paper? i dont need no stinking Paper!!

oh, and today was the first day i used Pocket Excel for a table my ethics teacher put on the board. Very Kick arse, and if you familiar with the desktop version its a breeze to use, slightly different though...

Later i will get into PowerPoint Presentations, Maps and Movies...

For now I must sleep....

[neuromancer]

Wow! That is very geek cool. Great post with loads if info ...

Thanks
David

[admin]

For entertainment purposes and to kill time the Pocket PC is great.

To kill time at first i would first play games. I installed a version of MAME for the pocket PC but it was to slow. But i did ending up finding Mrs Pac Man for it and it plays very well, you can use the stylus or the navigation buttons to play it. Got a cool arse pinball game called 4pinball This one takes up the whole screen, in Landscape view. Very cool. Great graphics and sound effects.

I also got into a Golf game. Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Very addicting and stressful, i cant put for crap!

And then of course i got to have Black Jack and Video poker, cant find a decent slot game though.

some others:
Minesweeper
Casket
Brainstorm (kick arse puzzle type game)
solitaire
Sink the Ships (battleship)....

[admin]

When the playing of games gets boring, or stressed out, I also like to do some reading.

I am currently reading a Steven King novel, using Microsoft Reader, which comes preinstalled.

Reader is cool but you have to activate and it seems that the activation site at MS has been out of order for a long time, you can still use it but you get a little pop up telling you to activate it evertime you open reader.

and deleting Bookmarks is time consuming. you have to go each bookmark and delete it from there. Sux.

Other then that its pretty cool.

I also have another reader called uBook that lets me read PRC formatted Magazines and such. This reader can be switched to landscape view, which reader does not do, unless you use the keyboard driver i mentioned above.....

[Weave]

Killer!

Ok - more questions...

Does the Pocket PC have a file system?

Everything on a Palm is a PRC, PDB, PQA, PNC, or SCP... so no dragging over an html file or txt file. Can you create an html file on the Pocket PC using notepad? Is there a Notpad in  Can you make an html file and then open it in Pocket IE?

[admin]

Killer!

Ok - more questions...

Does the Pocket PC have a file system?

Everything on a Palm is a PRC, PDB, PQA, PNC, or SCP... so no dragging over an html file or txt file. Can you create an html file on the Pocket PC using notepad? Is there a Notpad in  Can you make an html file and then open it in Pocket IE?

sorry for the late reply...

The Pocket PC file system appears to be identical to that of Windows. I can create and view TXT documents with Pocket Word. Pocket Word does have its own file type though, .PSW, but you have the option of saving them as DOCs for the different versions of Word, 97 to XP. When synced there is a conversion process that converts the .PSW to .DOC though, you cant see the conversion though, to quick.

I looked quickly and i dont see a way to create an HTML page with Pocket Word. I can open html files and see the source though. And i dont see a way to open DOCs with Pocket IE, even if i do an Open With PWord still opens.

When I transfer Files over to the Pocket PC, which is done my either moving files over to Pocket_PC My Documents which resides on my PC, when the PPC is connected to the pc it will detect a change in the local folders and sync them, i have it set at autmatic sync. You can also move files over my going to My Computer and you will see a PDA icon next to my drives and then i can navigate to ALL folders on the Pocket PC, including Windows Directories and such.

The only way to move files to the CF Card or to the SD card would be this way.

Anyway, during the transfer it will see if there needs to be a conversion and do that first before hand.

The only conversion with my files is when i move Power Point Presentations. It converts them from .PPT to .CPT which is a Pocket Slides format.

With Pocket Slides you can create and view Power Point Presentations. I have only created basic arse presentations though, i use them as Flash Cards for Terms. You can add Images, animations and the like though. I like the fact that you can write on the screen also. Good for tracing or tracking the way crap moves.

I still need to talk about using the PPC for entertainment purposes though..

I love this thing....

[admin]

Movies!

The PPC came with Windows Media Player installed which can be used to view movies in the WMV format or listen to MP3s. I got a hold of two full length movies in WMV format. It looked good but when displayed into full screen the screen actually got smaller and rotated into landscape mode. I also noticed that half way through the movie the sound video would get choppy....

ahh, clarse is starting......to be continued..

[admin]

Movies continued...

I have since then found DivX movies especially encoded for Pocket PCs, Way cool crap.

i use a program called Pocket MVP to view the movies. Like i said the movies are reencoded for the pocket pc, they are about 140-200 MBs in size.

The movies I have found are the latest releases which look okay, to DVD rips which look awesome and sound great with Headphones.

Where do i find these movies?
with Xnews of course.

If my computer was fast enough and if i had enough space i could rip and encode my own DVDs...