Peter's Blog

I am not happy with my hp rx1950 pocketpc. Its lack of memory makes it flaky running multiple applications, some suddenly terminate without saving their data. They also randomly terminate when I turn it on from standby. This means that to be safe I have to exit the applications before powering down which makes continuing work tedious as I have to reopen the application in the right document. When memory is running short it can get very sluggish and it will often lock up and I have to press the reset button and wait a minute or so for it to reboot (it runs a version windows remember).

The upshot of all this is that I don't do any notetaking on it, which is the main reason I bought it.

It is fine for slingbox, surfing, rss etc, although slingbox player locks up if I try to use the remote control in landscape mode: could be slingbox but more likely the O/S and it's appetite for memory (needs 20M or so of RAM out of 32M: how much? What is it doing with it? How much of this could/should have been fixed in ROM?).

Options:

• Buy Dell axim X51 or HP hx2490
• Give rx1950 to wife/sell on ebay/use for satnav (it's too gutless for skype which would be the main use the wife could make of it)
• Live with it

Decisions.

Update: Bought a new Dell Axim x51v via ebay for £80 off Dell price, currently in the post. This is one of the fastest WM5 PDA's there is so it should have the horsepower for skype and it has twice as much ram so hopefully apps won't randomly terminate. Incidentally, I tried Minimo, a port of firefox to pocketpc, and it was hopeless, barely managed to show google.com. I think this was down to memory demands, given that firefox is pretty gluttonous in this regard.

x51v features compared to rx1950:

• cpu more than twice as fast
• 256M flash
• 64M RAM
• bluetooth
• 640x480 screen vs 320*240
• 3d graphics accelerator
• compact flash slot as well as SD which rx1950 has.
• an actual button to turn wifi on and off

I think the decider in making me buy this was the prospect that daynotez might be usable on it.

Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.

I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.

Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.

The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.

Bullet point review:

• first impression when I took it out the box was how light it is, much lighter than my old palm. It's fairly thin as well, maybe half an inch thick. It would fit better in a trouser pocket if not for the carry case that comes with it which is almost as thick again.
• nice solid build quality: HP after all.
• stylus has a tendency to fall out: I put it in the carrying case the wrong way round to restrain it or I would certainly lose it.
• no charging cradle: comes with a USB cable and a mains adapter that plugs into the USB cable: rather awkward and fiddly and annoying that it cannot charge from the USB port. There are aftermarket USB cables available that will charge it.
• synchronises with the pc using activesync and I was amazed to discover that it won't sync over the wifi. Apparently microsoft decided it was a security hole and they couldn't think of a way to plug it so they just removed the feature. This leaves USB or infra-red so I'm using USB when I feel the need. Many pocketpc apps are available as cab files that can be downloaded directly to the device over the wifi and installed. Some producers are not enlightened to this and ship apps with windows installers that use activesync and hence can only be installed at home base.
• the device has 32M of 'program memory' for running programs data and this isn't really enough. The symptoms of this seem to be the o/s terminating apps that are not in the foreground. If you have, say, windows media player playing something then you can only run maybe one more program before something gets randomly zapped. Microsoft have tried to create a paradigm where you don't have separate applications but flip between different modes without worrying about having to close apps down. Apps are closed automatically by the OS as memory runs low and should be designed to save their state such that when they are reopened they are in the same state as when they were shut down. Unfortunately it looks like developers use standard development techniques and applications being suddenly terminated by the OS leaves the user high and dry.
• it has another 32M for storing programs but I bought a 1G SD card and I put everything in that.
• the screen is just about big enough. It is ok for reading without scrolling too much. For most web browsing it is awful unless I use http://skweezercom or google mobile to strip out any fancy stuff.
• the character recognisers that come with it are not much good: the handwriting recognition (transcriber) is slow and inaccurate. I am using something called Tengo which is a bit like predictive text on a phone so involves hitting only six big buttons. It has some clever design features and there is something about it that is kinda fun. I am writing this review with it so you may spot predictive-text style wrong word errors.
• a frequently used feature is the reset button: windows mobile is a typical windows o/s and isn't sophisticated enough to offer robust task management. Applications can lock it hard and banging on an unresponsive plastic screen is particularly fruitless.
• it has speaker and microphone. The speaker is just about loud enough to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried skype on it, the skype site doesn't list the rx1950 as supported and the cpu may not be fast enough.
• has 3.5mm audio jack and the sound to my ears was pretty good. It is a good mp3 player.
• battery life is very good, one charge gives a good day of use.

As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.

I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.

Skype is an application that allows you to make free phone calls to other Skype users over the internet. Now to persuade my mum to get broadband...

Program on TV about Skype and how VOIP is shafting telephone companies. Interesting to see that all Skypes development is done in Estonia and everyone in the company (100 people) use laptops. So why haven't they fixed the problem that makes my laptop take 2 minutes to come out of hibernate when skype is running?

Skype calling rates to Nigeria (23p/min) are still more expensive than Vonage (18p/min) and Alpha Telecom (14p/min). It's still cheapest to buy VAT free phone cards from street traders in Peckham (11p/min).

Tempted by Dell Axim X50, a PocketPC, which Dell are selling for £234 which seems like good deal for something with:

• Wifi (only b but that will do)
• Bluetooth
• 64M ram
• 128M flash
• Compactflash and SD slots: can share compactflash with my camera and they do a 1G card for £41.36 which is a good deal
• Free TV Tuner (!). Just have to walk around carrying a UHF aerial.
• Powerful IR emitter, useable as remote control.
• It works with Skype which means free phone calls from starbucks.

I haven't been using my Tungsten T2 recently. Reasons:

• My digitiser is flaky and I have to be pixel perfect clicking on things. The handwriting recognition is pretty poor, have to write ultra-big block capitals all the time which always seems like hard work.
• No Wifi Bluetooth is no comparison.
• Palm OS is pretty noddy compared to windows: it does have 'files' as such just databases which makes it hard to port anything to it.
• Appears to be a dying platform: Palm are being sluggish with their Wifi and this could be a fatal error.
• Sony are already pulling the plug on their Palm PDA's to focus on phones.

Saw two items of interest while out shopping yesterday, coincidentally the same price:

Doom 3 for xbox

£30, tempting. Nice to give it a try without upgrading my pc. Don't have any time to play it

Skype handset

£30. I had heard of these but didn't realise a local shop would have one. It is like a normal corded phone but plugs in usb socket. I was again tempted as it may encourage my wife to use skype, using conventional dialling buttons. I decided this was unlikely and the £30 would be better spent on a bluetooth headset: can't dial on it but can listen to podcasts and it is handsfree. I have one already.

My wife has had her phone for a year so down to the O2 shop for an upgrade. She fancied a change from Nokia and liked the colour of the Motorola V600 but unfortunately that is discontinued, it has been replaced by the V547 so I got her one of those. For free . It has:

• Clamshell design
• Bluetooth
• Big clear screen
• Camera: slightly better than nokia cameras (e.g. my 6610i, wife's old 7250i) don't look quite so much like they were taken through the bottom of a dirty jam jar. Still no match for a digital camera.
• MP3 ringtones! Cool, was able to download the crazy frog which has everyone in stitches.
• Good build quality
• The keyboard has a nicer feel than the Nokias which are a bit cheap and clicky.
• The UI is rather like my late lamented Sony-ericsson T68i: fiddly and annoying.
• Good predictive text: it quickly learns that you want to type 'am home' more often than 'an good'.

With the free phone I got 25% off a Jabra BT200 FreeSpeak Bluetooth Headset and a car charger for £5.

The Jabra headset Just Worked with the phone and it is indeed cool. My wife was delighted with it, she wants me to ring her whenever she goes out so she can pose with it. I set it up to voice dial and told her she can leave the phone in her handbag.

I wanted to try the headset with Skype so I tried reinstalling my existing bluetooth USB dongles:

Smart Modular Technologies

I downloaded their latest blueopal drivers and installed them. On first installation the Audio drivers and some other bits failed to install. It did manage to install an OBEX network driver and I was able to copy files to and from the phone. This is how I installed the crazy frog .mp3 file which I downloaded above. (Am I missing something? Was I supposed to pay for it?). I tried reinstalling the blueopal drivers to get headset support and was rewarded with my first every BSOD under windows XP. The setup program kept trying to reinstall, giving more BSOD's so I had to uninstall it manually by deleting files and picking the nasty bits out of the registry by hand.

MicroStar International (MSI) dongle

Luckily I had an MSI dongle as well. I downloaded the latest SP1 drivers for this (carefully avoiding the XP SP2 version that uses the new Microsoft USB stack but that not support a headset, not until MS get into the VOIP business) and installed them with no problems.

The headset gives new microphone and audio devices so I redirected everything to the headset and again it Just Worked. Skype worked ok and talking to someone in the same room you can hear a delay of about a second between them speaking and it coming through the headset. Ragarding range, the MSI dongle is supposed to have a 100m range and with the laptop downstairs the headset can receive anywhere in the house, although at the furthest reaches the sound gets a bit choppy. I won't try Skype over Wifi, my Wifi is too flaky.

Peter's vision of the future (well maybe not that visionary):

• full mp3 players in cell phones. If an iPod shuffle is the size of a stick of gum, why not make the cell phone a little bit bigger for a 500M flash memory chip?
• death of land line phones, ripped apart by mobile phones and VOIP.
• Nokia had better pull their fingers out, the V547 makes the Nokia phones look very dull.

Got around to trying Skype today for some VOIP fun and games. The main problem for me to set this up was the poor sound quality on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop. Using windows sound recorder with a plugin external microphone the recordings were distorted and pretty poor quality. I did some searching but I could find no fixes for this. Eventually I tried downloading new drivers for the SigmaTel C-Major Audio hardware from the Dell site. This fixed the problem.

I tried dialling my home phone but I could not get through because my home phone is set up to refuse calls from phones that withhold caller ID (to stop telesales) and Skype obviously has no caller ID to give.

Ringing wife's mobile I was able to amaze her and check Skype out simultaneously. It works. It's as good as using the phone and for ringing my mum in the evenings it works out cheaper than the landline. The rate to mobiles looks pretty steep, about 30p for a 30 second call.

I didn't need to fiddle with the DI624's firewall settings to get this working. For the record, I am on a 750k down/128k up broadband connection.

Now to ponder more about bluetooth headset.

pros:

• can make phone calls with hands free

cons:

• horrible pose factor makes it embarrassing to buy

Summary: Skype is cool.

Been reading more good things about Skype so decided to try it out again. My last flirtation was not good. I just downloaded version 1.0.0.106 and the hibernate problem is gone.

My plan now is to buy a cheap bluetooth headset. With it I can:

• pace the floor while talking on phone and gesture with both hands
• pursuade wife to use Skype
• listen to podcasts while she watches crapFamily Affairs.

I had a brief flirtation with Skype. I installed it because I was interested in the rather competitive call rates. It also works out cheaper for national calls than my current bog-standard NTL service.

However, I uninstalled it again for two reasons:

• Cannot imagine my wife getting to grips with using a computer, headphone and microphone to make a call.
• While Skype was installed it took my laptop about a minute to come out of hibernate instead of 15 seconds or so. That is not tolerable.

I never actually made a call with it. How can there be no delays in calls?

We use Alpha Telecom phone cards. In Peckham, London there are dodgy street sellers who sell three £5 cards for £10. Skype is not that competitive. The cards have the advantage that once the credit is used up that's it, you cannot talk any more without going to London. Saves plenty on the phone bill.