Dirk.Net

News of the imminent death of the Pocket PC were slightly exaggerated it seems.
HP is making a wise decision to revive the stand-alone Pocket PC device without phone software or hardware with two new models:

The iPAQ 110 (identical iPAQ 111, in Europe it’s called the iPAQ 114) and 220 are the first full (3.5 inch) screen Pocket PCs without phone functionality to be released in about 2 years. The 110 is already out, PocketPCCentral has an extensive review which has this quote:

Today, there may be a bit of a reawakening of the iPAQ, or at least an attempt at one, as HP has announced two new Windows Mobile PDAs without built-in phones.

The device is similar to the rx1950 of yore, weighing in at just 3.5oz and with the added goodies of 802.11g support as well as Bluetooth and many other new features. The unit retails for about US$ 300 and approximately the same in Euros.

The iPAQ 210 announced for early next year will even features a full VGA (640×480) display, making it even better as a handheld PDF reader which, unlike the Amazon Kinlde, will have mature PDF support as well as a backlit display. From this review:

For a long while, it seemed the standalone Windows Mobile PDA, or Pocket PC, was a thing of the past.  Now, HP is giving new hope for those who want a separate PDA and phone with an upcoming iPAQ 210 Enterprise Handheld which is just such a dedicated PDA device, offering a powerful Windows Mobile device without phone hardware or software.

It’s heartening to see the Pocket PC revived as it’s such a useful gadget not for the hardware (no phone, duh) but for the huge canon of software created over the past few years. Now if we’d just see a comeback of the Palm to get some new competition going in this space.

QuickTime and the Pocket PC are not a good match.

QT uses mainly the older and proprietary Sorenson Video codecs (codec: compressor/decompressor, a software component used to translate video or audio between its uncompressed form and the compressed form in which it is stored) whose specs Apple kept secret so they had to be reverse-engineered for the ffmpeg project. Pirates of Silicon Valley in reverse… As of today support for the Quicktime codecs has yet to emerge with any player, even the super-versatile TCPMP.

As a workaround you might have to convert your .mov files into the likes of MPEG-4 with the SUPER app mentioned yesterday (which works fine in spite of my rant). To get the accompanying AAC sound decoded you will need the pertinent TCPMP plugin from here. Thanks to the “Don’t be Evil” mantra the latest Sorenson codecs (Sorenson Spark/H.263) as used by YouTube and other web video sources couldn’t be kept secret as in the bad old days. To play such encoded videos you just need this TCPMP plugin. Hope it helps.

Three years ago I pondered what was missing from my collection of devices, and I thought that it would be great to have a GPS receiver that was a fully featured PDA, preferably a Pocket PC (PPC, as Palm was already on its death bed at the time). And from Mitac came along the mighty Mio 168 which I was very lucky to find at a department store in central Frankfurt, just before flying back to Thailand where I would have had trouble to find it at the time.

Over the past few years this had been my greatest gadget. I have read numerous books and articles in PDF format (Adobe Acrobat to convert anything into PDF is one of my busiest apps). You can read when the lights are out so you don’t wake wife and child. And besides the killer app Acrobat Reader anything that comes to mind will have the fitting mobile app.
GPS programs are almost to numerous to mention, most being freeware and merging geographic data nicely with desktop apps, with OziExplorer being my program of choice for years. Even before Google Earth you could take a scan or digital photo of maps and calibrate them with your OziExplorer, then upload the maps to the Pocket PC and navigate in places you have never been before and where there’s no traffic navigation systems. I also use the Pocket Office apps (especially Excel), guitar tuners and metronome freeware, Intelligolf for golf scores and statistics, Pocket Stars to navigate the night sky with the help of GPS, the incomparable Concise Oxford Dictionary, the Britannica Pocket Edition for quick reference and the Duden for German language reference. I hardly ever play games but there is excellent freeware chess, skat (German card game), even Monopoly. And then there’s the fantastic media player TCPMP for movies and MP3s. Anything you can think of, it’s out there somewhere, at good prices, much of it even freeware. 

From the developer standpoint, developer support for the Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) platform from Microsoft has been very good indeed, with the latest Compact Framework 2.0 making development of rich mobile applications very easy.

After having bought my second Pocket PC an HP iPAQ rx1950 for very little money about six month ago I was planning to use this second Pocket PC as a mobile MP3 player around the house, receiving the stream via Wi-Fi and playing it with the aforementioned TCPMP player.

Searching around the mall here in Chiang Mai the dearth of Pocket PC devices was truly surprising. I was at first discounting this as the a local phenomenon as Thais really don’t fancy bulky and complicated devices but prefer nimble and sleek phones and things that game. Looking further it became clearer that the classic large screen PPC has given way almost entirely to specialized and integrated devices. There are the dumb navigation units, some of which don’t even have the Windows Mobile 5 apps installed. Don’t even dream of installing OziEplorer or any other feature rich GIS app on these dunces. Then there are the integrated devices, the Pocket PC Phones and the so-called Smart Phones. With some notable exceptions, they tend to have much smaller screen than the “classic” Pocket PC (at most 2.8″ instead of 3.5″+ for the classic Pocket PC) making reading text difficult, and are clearly geared towards the mobile phone function. Per definition the Smart Phone also does not a touch screen.

Coming back home I my mood sank as I found that there are indeed hardly any new Pocket PC devices. Hell, even the wikipedia article is outdated! Then I googled ” Is the Pocket PC dead?” and found this discussion, with most posters confirming my fears even since about a year ago.

How can the most versatile gadget be dying? Is it the user’s yearning for “integration”. Or is it a business decision by the (former) PPC makers to move out of the market into increasingly dumb and specialized devices? With the Pocket PC Phones and Smart Phones it’s probably the former. Many users demand the integration of the mobile phone into the PDA. Especially business users have their address list at hand and can do all their communication with just one device.

With the navigation stuff and the overloading of the devices with doubtful features like cameras and keyboards, it’s clearly a business issue with obvious parallels to the mobile phone market. Navigation is the catchphrase of the past few years and with the map bundles the makers they can demand much higher prices than for classic PPC. Bundling the maps with a PPC would also make the maps more hackable. As for cameras and other doubtful features, it’s also the faint hope of the industry to be able to demand more money for doubtful extensions of the core feature set.

So the classic Pocket PC is being squeezed. But why are the devices discontinued at the current rate? What’s wrong with selling basic PPCs cheap and make them into commodity items? Right now it would probably be feasible to sell a basic Pocket PC for around 150 bucks and still make a profit. It might be that the extensibility and programmability of the PPC is coming back to haunt it. Why buy an expensive navigation unit if I can get the bits and pieces from the Internet?

This development must hurt the countless Windows Mobile developers who have trusted in a growing market for years to come. Will Microsoft come to their rescue and issue a PPC-based killer device? Will it have a chance against the iPhone or will it fare like the Zune? Or will there be a backlash as is brewing against “can do all” mobile phones which are good at everything except making calls? The PDA is defined by it’s versatility as a Personal Digital Assistant, a helper for all kinds of tasks that may come up. And their configuration is ultimately for the user to decide and not for the suits who have a vested interest in dumbing down the devices or overloading them in a frenzy of featuritis.

The Pocket PC isn’t dead yet, but it doesn’t look very healthy. Here’s hoping that user and developer demand will help this most useful of gadgets survive.

Certainly there are several options, some commercial and some freeware/regware. However, after installing some of the available choices which didn’t really cut it for different reasons I realized that I have a great player for MP3 files already installed on my PPC. I have used TCPMP (formerly BetaPlayer) for about three years as a reliable player of video files for the Pocket PC, mainly for checking my golf swing (swapping SD cards with .avi files from a digital camera). As it turns out, TCMP is also a great player for MP3 with excellent sound, playlists in several formats, equalizer (latest versions) etc. It’s very easy to customize with an exemplary GUI. So if you can go without bloated skins and themes this is the player for you. It plays AC3, HE-AAC, AMR, DivX, FLAC, H.263, H.264, JPEG, Monkey’s Audio, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MP2, MP3, Musepack, MS-MPEG4-v3, PNG, Speex, TIFF, TTA, Vorbis, WAV, WavPack and XviD and the following container formats: 3GP, ASF, AVI, Matroska, MPEG, OGG, OGM and QuickTime. Truly one player to rule them all for the Pocket PC (both Windows CE and Windows Mobile) and also for Windows, Windows Smartphone, Palm OS and Symbian OS with Linux and Mac OS X versions being planned.