The PC in my Pocket
John writes in the palm in my hand:
Doug seems to face never-ending torment with his PDA, and he asked (challenged?) me to list what I use mine for. I briefly considered creating the list on the Palm itself, but a whack to the head quickly brought me back to reality (and was likely less masochistic than actually creating the list using Graffiti 2). Anyhoo, here are some of the things I do with my Palm:
1. Reading articles and papers. I started with iSilo several years ago, but have been an avid fan of Plucker ever since trying it about two years ago. I use the Sunrise offline sync tool and Firefox extension to quickly grab content for Plucker to display.
I’d like to do this. Someone has figured this out how to gimple together Sunrsise and Vade-Mecum to do this for a PocketPC.
You can sync offline content with IE on your PC and it will show up on the PDA. I’d also like to browse to site on my PDA and immediately make available offline, so I can disconnect from the internet and continue reading. A big problem is that I use firefox as my web browser, and mainly on a mac.
2. Read MS Office and PDF docs offline. As I’ve mentioned in a past posting, Documents to Go has excellent support for native MS Office files, and the latest version adds support for native PDF files as well.
Office docs seem to read ok on a Pocket PC. I don’t know if native office documents would work, or if you have to use active sync to convert them.
Acrobat reader is miserable on the PocketPC, and no nice conversion to a readable format. You have to do this on the PC if you can get pdftohtml working.
3. Offline calendar with alarms. The original “killer app” that got me interested in PDAs in the first place. A 15-minute alarm prompting me to get to a meeting I’ve forgotten about has saved me more times than I’d care to admit.
A great app for me to, and it actually works on Windows Mobile — if you can get ActiveSync (aka TimeSink) working. For a sense of how people feel about ActiveSync and the problems and error codes they experience using it (if you are a COM programmer, you will recognize the 32 bit hexadecimal numbers as COM errors, not that this will help you), check out Microsofts newsgroup microsoft.public.pocketpc.activesync.
4. Offline Tasks with alarms. I use Outlook Tasks to track the stuff I have to get done, and alarm ticklers for these tasks sync’ed to my Palm mean I’m bugged at least three times more often than I otherwise would be. The jury is still out as to whether or not this is a good thing, and whether this has any impact on task completion rate [grin].
I use this a lot. I categorize tasks @home, @waiting, @errand and set reminders for some (i.e. taking out the garbage weekly - wished I still lived in Saanich where the garbage men and women find your garbage cans on your property so you don’t have to bring them to the curb).
The latest version of ActiveSync, when it actually is able to synchronize, seems to work. ActiveSync 3.8 seemed to do weird things with task completion status.
5. Offline contact list. Now what was that phone number again? With my Palm at hand, I can quickly look up phone numbers and email addresses when I’m away from my computer. Hey, Doug, it even synchronizes photos embedded in Outlook Contacts!
This too is a great app for PocketPC users; the latest version of ActiveSync has caught up to the Palm app for synchronizing contacts; embedded images in contacts are now synchronized to the device. woe to you who try and synchronize their contacts to two PCs though. Palm users might have similar pain in this circumstance.
6. World clock with time zones and alarm clock. World Clock lets you set up a simultaneous display of the time in several locations around the world, and I’ve found the alarm clock more reliable than many of the clocks (and wake-up calls) I’ve come across in my travels.
There is an alarm clock in Windows Mobile. I think you get one travel zone. I haven’t used this much.
7. Carry around pictures, audio and movies. My Palm TX does come with a reasonable amount of internal memory, but a 1GB SD card gives me the space needed to carry around some mp3 tunes, podcasts, a selection of photos, and even try out the odd video. The open source TCPMP player can handle nearly any audio/video encoding, and video support on the new iPod has done much to increase the availability of digital videos formatted for smaller screens.
Photos work. I have been trying to get movies working too for traveling, but I use standards based formats on my computers (quicktime and mpeg 4 encoded with AAC audio and H.264 video), I almost have a way to view this on my Axim.
8. Pass the time with games like Bejeweled 2 (which I’m finding to be a seriously addicting game).
Never tried games.
On reflection, what I find most interesting is how I actually use my Palm vs how I thought I would before I got my first one. I anticipated using the Palm to manage appointments and tasks, with the potential to eventually replace pen and ink as my note taking tool of choice. Instead, I really treat my Palm as a portable viewer for documents, appointments, tasks and notes that I primarily create and manage on my computer.
It is hard to input data into these things. I am tempted to get a keyboard for it, for typing when I am away from the PC for awhile.
I too mainly reading offline stuff I have created on my PC. Offline reading could be better. Something like Microsoft Reader that works on Windows Mobile 5. So far no joy with Reader itself. The earlier version didn’t work on flash-stored files, and the latest can’t open documents I made with a freeware program that created .lit files - looks like a DRM or security issue. I haven’t tried open source .lit books yet. Generally, reading ebooks on my PDA is more pleasant than reading paper.
What I wish for from a PDA:
- Syncs up contacts, tasks, etc. nicely to multiple computers, both Macs and Windows. This sort-of works now with Windows Mobile synchronizing to one computer.
- Plays quicktime and mpeg4 with aac, and aac audio.
- Offline reading as good as plucker, works with Firefox to select content for offline viewing, on my Mac.
- Presents PDFs they way I want to see them (as a web page with flow layout clear typography) rather than the way the publisher prints them.
- Saves what I am viewing with the embedded browser for later offline viewing.
- Offline or online viewing of syndicated feeds, synchronized with what I have read already on other computers.
- Easy VPN access
- Sync over network including wifi, ethernet, VPN
- Synchronizing most of my documents and notes on my PC, with text and keyword search on my pda for all files synchronized (including images, and video - automatically compressed for PDA viewing). If I write on my pc a small note about a person or the size of my furnace filter, I want it on my PDA, and I want to find it fast. I sure don’t want notes synchronized to outlook. Another alternative might be a wiki that synchronizes between multiple PCs including my PDA.
I do need to investigate whether I can get Plucker or ISilo working, and to see what AvantGo can do besides synchronize my travel itenary or a map to my PDA.
The general consensus if you read blogs and the related Microsoft newsgroups is that at the time of this writing Windows Mobile 5 pretty much doesn’t work and Active Sync is not much better.
If you want a real PDA workhorse, I’d really think PalmOS is the way to go, based on the lack of problems John and Gord have had with the software and synchronization features. The only thing I’d miss going to Palm is the ability to read .lit (Microsoft Reader) documents.
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