Suppose you just purchased a new Pocket PC device, you open the box, charge it up, and turn it on. Perhaps if you are generally familiar with PDA’s you know enough to begin entering your personal data. When you have finished entering your contact information, calendar, and tasks, what next? Is this all you purchased, the Pocket PC with the fastest processor around, equipped with a more colorful, high resolution display, all just to display your personal data? The answer is yes, but as the TV salesmen are fond of saying, “But wait there’s more!”
As a long time user of Pocket PC devices, beginning with the Compaq PC Companion C140 in 1997, I have witnessed the Pocket PC gradually evolve to its current state as the Swiss Army knife of gadgets. Unlike a Swiss Army knife, however, Pocket PC’s don’t start life out-of-the-box with everything you need to discover their true potential. It is more like a new PC, where your first task is to load the right assortment of applications. So you begin your exploration, researching the available options, and downloading trial versions of candidate applications. Given enough time you find all the applications that you could possibly imagine and your Pocket PC reaches its full potential. Suddenly you realize that your Pocket PC has grown up, and is ready to match wits with its heavier, bulkier brother, your laptop computer. You are now ready to embark on your next journey away from home, many pounds lighter, confident that you carry all of your computing needs quite literally in the palm (no pun intended 
) of your hand. The question remains, however, just what applications will cause this transition from Pocket PC the PDA, to Pocket PC the laptop killer?
Well, let’s begin by considering the common uses of a laptop, and see how this translates to a Pocket PC device. For the sake of discussion we will focus on my favorite Pocket PC from Hewlett Packard, the iPAQ 6315, Windows Mobile 2003 Phone Edition Device
Email
First and foremost, laptops are used to obtain email messages and their voluminous attachments. Pocket PC’s have been able to retrieve email for some time through an included email application, but only when an internet connection is established with an external cable or add-on peripheral. The 6315, however, provides two forms of built-in internet connectivity, WiFi and GPRS. WiFi provides the same short range, high speed connectivity, which is built-in to most laptops. GPRS, however, uses the GSM cell phone network, to achieve wide area, low-speed connectivity, something most laptops do not provide as a built-in option. This essentially creates the capability to retrieve email anywhere, anytime.
Word Processing
Perhaps the next most common use of laptops is for creating and editing documents, including, if you are a software developer, source code files. All Pocket PC devices include Pocket Word out-of-the-box to allow you to create and edit Word documents with a limited subset of formatting options. But suppose you have a large document you are creating, and you will need to type for hours at a time. How would you use a Pocket PC device for such work? The character recognition area at the bottom of the display is fine for short notes, but your hand would surely fall from your arm if you tried to use it for more than a few paragraphs of text entry. The answer is a foldable keyboard.
The foldable keyboards available for Pocket PC devices collapse down to the size of the Pocket PC device itself, and provide a full QWERTY keyboard, every bit as useful as the one on your laptop. The one I use is, the Targus Universal Wireless Keyboard, will work with any Pocket PC device through the use of the infrared port. This is good news, since the IR port uses the least amount of power of all the wireless connection options provided on the 6315.
If you are a developer like me, and you have source code files to edit, do not despair. Though PocketWord can open these documents, it is not designed to provide “chromacoding” and proper formatting of source code. What you need is CEdit to open Visual Studio (VS 6.0 and 2003) project files to allow you to read and edit source code in a very useable manner. Sorry, no compilation of the source code is provided just yet . Okay, score one for the laptop.
Reading PDF Files
As you are probably aware, many large documents are now provided as PDF files. It is even possible to obtain many printed magazine subscriptions and/or articles in PDF form. The Adobe Reader for Pocket PC, available at no charge from Adobe, will allow you to open and read these documents in their original layout. More importantly, a recently added feature, also allows you to “reflow” the document to accommodate the limited width of the PDA screen. Without this capability you would be forced to manually scroll left and right as you read each line. With reflow, the width of the line is reduced and the document lengthened so that it can be read by simply scrolling downward. Documents may also be rotated 90 degrees to widen the viewable are of each line to the longer dimension of the display height. This is accomplished all without requiring an upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition which provides built-in support for screen rotation.
Listening to Music
You may not use your laptop to listen to music, but your Pocket PC makes a great MP3 player, and unlike a dedicated MP3 player, you get to choose the user interface and features you like best in the context of the MP3 player application. There are lots of applications to choose from offering various features ranging from special display modes for use while driving, to sophisticated play list management capabilities. In many cases streaming audio protocols are also supported, allowing you to play audio files found on various websites in real-time without waiting for the download of the complete file.
I have tried steaming audio using the GPRS connection provided with the 6315, and assuming the required data rate of the audio source is under 20 Kbps, it works well with an occasional delay to refill the local audio buffer. After trying many MP3 players, the one which I feel offers the best combination of features in a well designed user interface is PocketMusic.
Watching Movies
If you are traveling on a plane, you may have used your laptop to watch a DVD movie. You may have noticed that without an additional battery, or a battery with extended capacity, it is often difficult to watch a full 2 hour movie without draining your battery to near exhaustion. Enter the Pocket PC!
After transcoding (a process that converts video files encoded in one format to another format) the video file on your desktop to a format better suited for playback on handheld devices, you are ready to go. When using your 6315 you will need to store the video file on an SD Card, since the file size will is generally around 80 MB to 200 MB per hour, depending on the desired resolution and sound quality. The transcoding application I use is called PocketDivX Encoder.
and the player application is TCPMP (formerly BetaPlayer) both available at no charge, though I recommend you consider a donation to support continued development on these outstanding applications.
TCPMP is specially designed for video decoding and playback on Pocket PC devices and produces outstanding quality, playable in landscape mode with the Pocket PC turned on its side (again without an upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003 SE). You will be amazed at how entertaining your Pocket PC device can be, once limited to work related tasks, while you stare at it for hours. Expect to get anywhere from 4 to 6 hours of playback time, depending on the age (number of charge cycles) of your battery and level of the back light.
Voice Command
The ability to translate voice commands to desktop actions and text which appears in a word processing document, has been available for sometime on your laptop through various products. I am not an expert in the use of such products, but lately I have realized the huge advantage in the use of voice command on handheld devices. Unlike laptops, the use of a handheld device often occurs while standing or in the midst of some other more compelling activity (driving). This makes the ability to initiate a function on your Pocket PC without diverting your eyes especially important. My favorite product in this realm is available direct from Microsoft and is called Voice Command.
Voice Command provides speaker independent translation of commands to perform a limited set of actions, such as playing back a specified music file or dialing a phone number by contact. My use of this product is limited to dialing of a contact at one of the numbers previously entered. I pronounce the name of the contact, exactly as it was entered, including which phone number I am interested in, and it asks for confirmation (an option which can be disabled), by pronouncing the name of the matching contact.
So for example, I might say “Call John Smith at Home” after which I would hear a request for confirmation, “Call John Smith at Home?” I reply by saying, “Correct” and dialing proceeds. I might also say, “Incorrect” and I would be prompted to try again. I would say that Voice Command gets it right about 90% of the time, with the largest occurrence of errors corresponding to short names, or when my spoken request occurs in a noisy environment. This is remarkable when considering that I have hundreds of contacts, all with last names that might have strange pronunciations.
Other features are offered, such as reading back the text of an alarm which appears for an upcoming appointment. I don’t have the space to cover all the features, but suffice it to say, that Voice Commander extends the usage model of a Pocket PC device considerably.
Reading News Group Postings
If you are a Geek like me you probably read news group postings to obtain technical information or to converse with your peers on such obscure topics as what to do with your newly purchased PDA . If you use a laptop for this, you are forced to sit down and write your replies, even when you may typically write only a few lines here and there. With a Pocket PC, reading news groups is transformed to a form of delayed messaging. Let me explain how.
Among the various newsreaders available for Pocket PC devices, all require that at some point you obtain the headers of the newsgroups in your subscription list. Using the 6315 (or any other Pocket PC device with a WAN connection such as GPRS) you can then select which postings you wish to read and request that they be downloaded. Because you are using a WAN connection, accessible from wherever you have cell phone coverage, you can reply to a post while standing, or while on the train, or in the airport, or while waiting in line at the bank (you get the idea). For me, this has elevated my news group reading to a process more akin to instant messaging, where I can respond on impulse, without interrupting my daily routine to sit down at my laptop.
My favorite news group reader is Qusnetsoft NewsReader III. It is as capable as my laptop news reader (Outlook Express) and includes support for reading RSS feeds.
Listening to Podcasts
For those of you have heard of Podcasts, but don’t know what they are let me provide a very brief introduction. First and foremost, Podcasts are seriously misnamed. Though the word Pod appears in the term, “Podcast” it is not limited to use on iPods. In fact, Podcasts consist of MP3 files which can be played back on any device equipped to decode and playback MP3 files including, of course, Pocket PC devices. So this begs the question, how does one obtain these MP3 files?
First a little background. Sometime ago the concept of web page syndication was introduced in the form of a standard XML file format called “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) feeds. This allowed the articles which appeared on web sites to be referenced in abstract form, and if the human reader found the topic of interest, downloaded in full text form. Later this standard was extended to include more than just textual data, but also allowed the URL of data files to be referenced. The data files are called “enclosures” and are analogous to attachments which can be included with an email message. The key to the popularity of enclosures is that the data files can reference anything with a URL, such as an MP3 file, but could also be extended to other file types, such as AVI (video) or JPEG (pictures) files. Podcasting leverages the use of enclosures in RSS Feeds by referencing MP3 files containing anything from radio programs to a personal diatribe.
With a Pocket PC you can download Podcasts (RSS Feeds with enclosures) and their associated MP3 files by using a specialized application which runs directly on the Pocket PC device. Another option is to use your SD Card (or any other removable media) and an SD Card reader (generally an external USB device) plugged into you laptop or desktop computer (can’t gid rid of those anchored computing devices just yet ). You would then select one of the many desktop applications that support Podcasting (such as iPodder) and configure the application to save the MP3 enclosures to the SD Card. In my case, I remove the SD Card from my 6315 when I return from work, and insert it into the SD Card reader. My desktop Podcasting application, iPodder, is configured to automatically synch up with each of the Podcasting sites on my list of favorites and save the enclosed MP3 file on the SD Card. In the morning, on my way to work, I remove the SD Card from the reader and reinsert it in my Pocket PC device. On my way to work, I then listen (through the use of an FM transmitter connected to the head phone jack) to my Podcast MP3 files using the same application described above in Listening To Music. These days my long commute just seems to fly by with all the entertaining and thought provoking Podcast content available.
Browsing Files On The Network
If your Pocket PC has the ability to connect to a wireless network, one thing I like to do with my wireless connection is browse the available file shares on the PC’s connected to the same network. This allows me to copy files to the SD Card on my iPAQ 6315 and directly access documents on the file share just by clicking on them. This capability is not available in the standard Windows Mobile File Explorer. Thankfully, it is available in the Resco File Explorer, along with many other browsing capabilities, such as that required for accessing FTP servers and the Registry contained in the Pocket PC (functionally identical to the Registry on the Windows desktop).
Remote Desktop
Let’s say that you follow my advice, and you leave that laptop at home on your next journey. Yet despite all of your efforts installing the applications I have recommended and perhaps a few more, you still forgot something. Maybe you realize that you forgot to transfer an eBook you are reading to your SD Card, or worse yet, let’s say that you have left that PowerPoint presentation you were supposed to make, on your home PC. Fear not! There are many ways to obtain it, but let’s say for the sake of convenience you decide to email it to yourself so that you can retrieve it the next time you read email on your Pocket PC. So how would you get that email message generated on your desktop PC at home, with only your Pocket PC and an internet connection?
Windows XP offers Remote Desktop capability, and if it is enabled on your desktop system (through the Remote tab under System Properties) you are in good shape. Something called a Terminal Services Client is available for Pocket PC devices and is provided out-of-the-box with the iPAQ 6315. You first establish an internet connection, either through a GPRS or WiFi connection on the 6315, type the IP address of your desktop system (or its associated network switch if you are using some form of IP address sharing) and you will soon see a dialog box prompting you for your user name and password. After you have logged on you will immediately notice that the small screen of your Pocket PC is now a scrollable viewing area for your Windows desktop. It takes a bit of practice, but after you find the Start button and load Outlook you will be able to type yourself an email message just as if you were sitting at your desktop, all from your Pocket PC.
An Open Source project called RealVNC for Real Virtual Network Computing also provides a Remote Desktop capability, along with the ability to share access with the local user of the PC. Thanks to the availability of the source code, the VNC viewer has been ported to Pocket PC devices. I am not that familiar with the Pocket PC implementations of VNC, though I do use RealVNC on my PC to share my desktop with a remote user. If you are interested in an alternative to the Remote Desktop feature of Windows XP, or you need Remote Desktop capabilities on a Windows 2000 PC, I suggest you research VNC for your Pocket PC and let me know what you learn.
Conclusion
“And that’s not all! If you order now…” I could go on and give you even more reasons to leave your laptop off your laptop and on your desk, but I think this should give you a good start in experiencing the full potential of a Pocket PC device. After many years of evolution, the Pocket PC has finally lived up to its name as a PC for your Pocket.