TamsPPC – the PocketPC Blog

HP Austria has just confirmed to us that all of the upcoming ipaq handhelds are delayed. The table below contains the current shipment dates as announced by HP Austria. Once again; this data is directly from HP – no rumored data here:

Model name	Price	Original ETA	New ETA	Datasheet download
iPAQ 114 Classic Handheld	299€€	End of October	November 2007	.pdf
iPAQ 214 Enterprise Handheld	399€€	Beginning of November	January 2008	.pdf
iPAQ 314 Travel Companion	399€€	Mid/End of November	No change	.pdf
iPAQ 614/614c Business Navigator	599€€	Mid of December	February 2008	.pdf
iPAQ 914/914c Business Messenger	599€€	Mid of January	May 2008	.pdf

For me, HP’s ipaq 214 and Aceeca’s MZ2000 are among the top handhelds that will be released in the near future due to their VGA screens and extremely powerful processors.

HP Austria claimed that the 114 and 214 boxen will be released around the 1st of November – but neither of the two has materialized as of now. HP’s American web site has been updated to state that the device will drop in 2008 only…aka that the machine was delayed by at least 3 months.

On the other hand, the Austrian HP web site states that the device will become available in fall 2007 as originally planned.

TamsPPC is currently expecting a statement from HP on the matter – stay tuned for further information!

Last week, I received the Proporta Alu-Leather Case for the Dell Axim x51v. When I unwrapped it, I noticed the high-grade quality and finish. In fact, the black case looks very stylish and fits very the Axim very well. I ordered the case in flip type, which means it can be opened by flipping the cover like you open a clam-shell phone.

In the inside of the Proporta Alu-Leathercase, you will find two storage card holders where SD-cards fits perfectly into.

At the side of the main part of the case are two rigid holders where the Dell Axim x51v/x51/x50v/x50 fits perfectly: the PocketPc won’t move once inserted. The clasp is magnetic, so you don’t have to worry that it will unintended opened.

You may notice that the upper part of the case is very rigid. This is the “unique Proporta Aluminium “Screen Saver” System” which prevents the Pocket PC to get damaged if you drop it.

Compared to the original Dell nylon case, it is a little more thick and long but looks much better. See the pictures below!

When you order the case, it will come with the standard Proporta belt clip. Now lets come to the only negative thing I noticed about this case. If you want to listen to music and plug in your headphones, the Axim won’t fit into the case, because there isn’t enough space between the top of the Axim and the case.

All in all, if you are owner of a bluetooth headset or if you don’t use your Axim to listen to music, this is a good-looking and high quality case. It costs 35$ at Proporta’s web site…

PRO

• good design and quality
• holders for two SD cards
• very effective screen protection
• includes a belt clip
• magnetic clasp
• lifetime warranty

CONTRA

• PPC doesn’t fit in the case with headphones plugged in

Finally, I want to show you how your Pocket PC will look like if you don’t use a protection (I dropped mine several times, so I’m very happy now to have a good protection):

Here’s a little bit of extra info for all those of you who are living in an area with excellent CDMA coverage. Sprint has acquired the rights to the HTC Touch(the original one) and begins to push it out at its customers.

Overall, the boys at CNET’s give the device a favorable 7/10, the chief source of disappointment is the lack of a hardware keyboard(as found on the Touch Dual) and the fact that the TouchFLO interface is disabled while the device is in landscape mode. As of now, CNET does not have any further information on when the device will hit the market.

For me, this is a great sign. Usually, if a company releases one device for CDMA, further ones will follow – who knows; maybe we will have the full HTC lineup available with CDMA transmitters soon!

After your upgrade to Windows Mobile 6, you still miss some applications which weren’t included in the upgrade. In the lower part of this site, there are two packages with this software. You have to download them from the German uploading service Rapidshare.

Package 1 – Contents:

• Adobe Reader LE
• Arcsoft MMS 4.2.8.1
• HTC Audio Manager
• HTC Bluetooth Printing Plugin
• Midlet Manager
• Windows Live 10.6.30.2100
• HTC Network Plugin (virtual folder for Windows network resources)
• Microsoft PowerPoint Mobile
• Remote Desktop Mobile
• HTC Streaming Player
• MS VoIP addon
• Windows Update
• Settings needed if you have Windows Vista (Device Center)
• Sound Fix (if you have sound problems)

Package 2 – Contents:

• another Arcsoft MMS 4.2.8.1
• enabling MMS messaging
• enabling Windows Update
• additional resources for MDA III in Windows Vista

In the next parts of this article we will write how to install certain apps, how to fix bugs that appear often, and solutions and tricks for other problems.

Opera has published a new post in their “Opera Mini” blog. According to their post, “the next step in mobile browsing” will push the mobile browsing another step closer to desktop browsing. While that is already the only hint they give, they intend to publish more information on the Rock Opera Event in San Francisco (25th October). Then they will also publish a new beta of Opera Mini and the release of Opera 9.5 for Desktop.

Now what could this “next step” be? Perhaps something to display multimedia contents? Please write us what you think!

Read the full post.

vTap allows the user to watch every YouTube video on your PocketPC! Just install it and enter your search – that’s it. Works very well, and it’s free!

vTap is available for Windows Mobile, UMPC’s and the iPhone. Get it here.

The last time I reported about FTouchFlo, it was available in version alpha 3. In the meantime, the developer was quite busy, and he published already the version 1.2. Here are all changes since version alpha 3:

1. Fixed bug with memory allocation which for 99.99999% was a reason for devices freezing. To avoid possible huge problems (even hardreset might be required sometimes!) with your devices I would recommend uninstall FTouchFlo 1.0 and 1.1 if you have them installed.
2. To avoid changing ‘/’ to ‘\’ in gestures parameters you have to put parameter value in brackets:
[will be changed]: UpDownAppCmdLine:/Program files/123.exe
[will not be changed]:UpDownAppCmdLine:”/cmd_line_parameter”

3. Devices freezing (I really hope!)
4. Slash – Backslash problem in configuration file. You can put there anything you want and FTouchFlo will change all / to \.
5. Excluded programs: sometimes currently active application wasn’t recognized and excluded.
6. User activity notification added. Before that when you’re just scrolling, windows didn’t know about your activities.

7. Horizontal scrolling in Programs, Settings, Office etc. solved.
8. Problem with excluded applications list solved.
9. Many improvements had been done in scrolling together with bugs fixing.
10. Problem with a few instances of FTouchFlo running at the same time solved. You’ll not start more than one instance now.
11. Problem with forwarding stylus events to gwes in scrolling mode solved. It was the reason of a unstable scrolling.
12. Problem with memory leaks when starting applications solved.

What’s new:

1. Possibility to set up initial mode: “Scrolling” or “Launching”.
There is additional parameter int the config file:
;Initial mode (S – scroll, L – launch)
InitialMode:S

2. Now you’ll see small icon at top of your screen showing current FTouchFlo mode.
S – scrolling, L – launching and D – disabled (application is in excluded apps list).

You can now switch between modes by tapping at the icon.

3. A few more or less bugs found and killed (of course some new bugs introduced )

Source: xda-developers.com

For more instructions how to use this tool, please visit the original thread at xda-developers! Very good work from eFrost, so please consider a little donation

Download FTouchFlo 1.2 here

For all users of Google Documents, this is good news. Google documents is now available for mobile devices! Unfortunaly, it’s only possible to view documents, not to edit them.

Direct link for mobile devices: http://docs.google.com/m

The Google presentation users have to wait a little bit longer.

SPB Software has just released the latest edition of Pocket Plus. We were provided a prerelease version for evaluation – this review is based on the release candidate version!

The PocketPC platform has often been ridiculed for enormous lags and delays. When these reports are examined closely, it usually comes down to users installing a plethora of small and tiny ’system enhancements’ that eat up CPU power and memory. SPB Pocket Plus is a collection of system enhancements – can it stack up?

Like most other applications of this type, SPB Pocket Plus is controlled from the system settings:

Here are a few of the gadgets I consider especially noteworthy:
Battery state indicator
The line visible on the top of all the screenshots in this review is the ‘battery indicator’. It allows you to keep an eye on your PocketPC’s energy supply at all times.

Close icon power-up
Tapping on the close icon for a long time pops up the following menu:

Additionally, the program allows you to ‘really close’ applications via their x button…this means that they won’t continue to run in the background.

Common Dialog update
The open/close file dialogs of the Windows Mobile operating system have classically been limited to just the My Documents folder. Pocket Plus breaks this barrier, allowing every application to save its data wherever it wants to:

File explorer update
A small menu is added to the PocketPC’s file explorer, allowing you to zip and encrypt files. While this could be helpful for some, I prefer a dedicated file manager like Resco’s.

Safe mode
Safe mode allows you to disable a variety of programs normally run at startup in order to diagnose bugs.

Tabs for Pocket Internet Explorer
Pocket Plus can enhance Pocket IE to support multiple tabs open simultaneously:

Today plug-in
Last but not least, what would a PPC toolkit be without a today screen plugin – images of their launcheresque tool below:

This review looked at a prerelease version of Pocket Plus 4 on a hp ipaq rx4240. The program needs 3MB of memory and has been pretty stable in the testing period.

Cutting a long story short, SPB Pocket Plus is a nice package of potentially useful, well-programmed gadgets. Some will find them incredibly useful, others will detest them. So, why not download the free trial software and play around a bit…if you see yourself using the gadgets often, purchase the app for approx. 30$ in the TamsShop(owners of v3 pay just 15$ via SPB customer care)!

eFrost from the XDA-Developers forum released a new version of the modified TouchFlo hack. I made a mistake in the last post and wrote “for all HTC PDAs”… This is wrong, because this will work on nearly every PDA running Windows Mobile!!

And here are the changes since Alpha1:

1. Improved calibration routine.
2. Excluded applications list added.
3. FTouchFlo doesn’t work if SIP is working.
4. Delay before “standard windows behavior” function decreased to 100ms.
5. Improved speed and reliability.

6. Before installing alpha 2 it is necessary to uninstall previous version. Calibration.dat file you shouldn’t delete because it is the same for alpha and alpha2.
7. FTouchFlo reloads configuration file (with excluded programs list) each time you’re opening new application, so after you add new application to exclusion list, keep in mind that FTouchFlo will start ignoring it after you switch to other application and then switch back.

8. Solved problem with iContact and other applications without name of window. Just put name of exe file into excluded programs list.
9. Delay function added to configuration: delay time in milliseconds before “standard windows behavior”.
10. Launch applications function added.
FTouchFlo now has 2 operation modes: scrolling and launching.
To toggle between operation modes you should use up-down gesture. If mode has been toggled you’ll hear a beep.
You can use GestureWaitingDelay parameter in the config file to set up how much time FTouchFlo will be waiting for gesture. So, for example, if you’ll set up there 1000 ms, FTouchFlo in the scrolling mode will be waiting 1000ms before start scrolling. As less GuestureWaitingDelay, as fast you should move your finger. Try to find suitable value for you.

You see, the creater is really busy getting this work!!  In the upcoming versions, we can except more reliability and usability. If you really like the program, you can help the developer with a small donation Donate

And here is the link to the original thread at xda-developers

DOWNLOAD FTouchFLO alpha 3 here

Dear TamsPPC readers,
I am proud to inform you that I will be at the Symbian Smartphone Roadshow in London. TamsS60 will provide you all with near-realtime reporting of what I see, and will additionally try to tape keynotes and other presentations for uploading to Google Videos as time permits.

If you feel like meeting me there, please leave a comment here with your email address – I would be more than glad to work something out!

You are owner of a HTC PDA, but don’t have the cool TouchFLO feature of the HTC Touch? Here is the solution for you!

Just download the cab-file below and install it. After a short calibration, you are only able to scroll with you fingers in every application with a scroll bar. The application is still alpha, so there could be some bugs.

The developer spend much of his free time porting the application to any HTC Device, so he would be happy if you could donate him: donate

Download it here.  It is definitly worth it.

When Palm first began to support Windows Mobile with the Treo 700w, Palm OS and Windows Mobile freaks were shocked. Nowadays, devices like the 750v are a common sight on Austrian roads…and now, Palm shocks again with the Treo 500v running Windows Mobile for Smartphones. Can the 500v enter the low-end market?

When looking at the box of the 500v, one immediately feels that this phone is not intended for businesspeople. The box looks cool and flashy – but not very businesslike.

Opening the box reveals a first steps folder – interestingly, the folder states that the Treo 500v was developed for Vodafone…

After removing the first steps folder, manual and software CD, the Treo and the battery can be seen on a plastic blister tray.

Removing the tray reveals the power supply with international plug, the sync cable and – finally – the headset. The 500v sports a few significant improvements…Palm managed to include a headset and – oh behold – used MiniUSB for communications…
.

Overall, Palm has clearly learnt a lesson from competitors like HP. The 500v ships with all one needs(except for a memory card) and can be charged via Mini USB like many other PocketPC’s and WM Smartphones – no complaints so far.

Tune in soon to look at the physical aspects of the 500v!

Acer’s Ferrari c500 has been pictured on the Taiwanese Computex in June(congratz to TheInquirer):

However, an Acer insider has just informed us that the device will definitely ship – but it will probably not be released this year. The source claims that the shipment date for the machine is delayed to Q1 or even Q2 2008…more than enough time for HP to sell a cartload of their new GPS-enabled-ipaq(complete with proper customer care that actually repairs devices; but more on that another day)!

Will you purchase the c500 when it finally hits the road?