TamsPPC - the PocketPC Blog

I recently met a person thinking:

Microsoft’s .NET framework is beautiful. MSIL(it’s assembly language) is even nicer. Not being able to precompile CF applications is even nicer. Thank you, Microsoft, for making my job easy. - Joe Cracker.

And indeed, applications compiled to MSIL can be decompiled, giving people who have access to your exe file access to your source code. We had something like that with Visual Basic 3 - but apparently, some people at Microsoft’s are very warm to the idea of open sourcing applications by force.

How else can you explain that it apparently is impossible to obfuscate an application in the build process? Yes, you can link a cab project to a regular one; and create a nice little cab file for deployment. Sounds easy…but Joe Cracker has a great time decompiling it.

If you feel like protecting your intellectual property, you instead need to break up the process into three pieces according to this MSDN discussion. First, you create the .exe file from Visual Studio. After that, you need to manually open DotFuscator - and after that, you need to get back to Visual Studio in order to generate a CAB file using the obfuscated file(NOT the project’s standard output). Got it? No? I am still struggling with it, too….

In the end, it is very impressive to see that a company like Microsoft(who appears to be very worried about people copying its wares) is completely unmotivated when it comes to protecting its developers. Obfuscating must be built into the compiler IMHO - forcing developers to make multiple steps by hand is an unacceptable procedure.

Probably, someone at Microsoft’s is living by the German mantra of keeping his own door clean - as long as it’s just third parties getting fu**ed, its not my problem. I can only hope that someone at Microsoft’s finally gets off his hide and makes obfuscation easy - millions of developers would instantly love him forever…

P.S. For all those of you who don’t have too much existing .net CF code yet(and don’t wish to give it out to Joe): AFAIK, ArianeSoft’s PPL is free of obfuscation issues…

Dear Readers,
this is a quick ping to inform you that we have performed a network-wide update of our content management software. TamsPalm, TamsPPC and TamsS60 are now powered by WordPress 2.3.2.

These updates are necessary in order to keep the content network secure, as each new release fixed security problems found in the last.

As always, please leave a comment or send an email to Tamog@gmx.at if you have any issues!

Sorry for any inconveniences
Tam Hanna

2007 was a eventful year for all of us following the mobile computing market - both users and developers faced many new opportunities and challenges. Apple will soon make mobile applications a “commodity” with its ixxx devices; Microsoft is in the process of overhauling the Windows Mobile UI in the upcoming WM revisions currently known as 6.1 and 7.0.

At Tamoggemon’s; 2007 was the year of expansion. Pocket PC and Series 60 news services were launched in order to bring our quality content to more people around the world; and new applications were launched.

Nothing is better suited to celebrate success than a nice software discount - the code MERRYNEWSOFTWARE gives you 20% off all Symbian, Pocket PC and Palm OS Software in the TamsShop! Feel free to get yourself or a friend a gift or two…

Last but not least, please stay with us in 2008! We are always busily at work in order to offer you new news services, analysts and applications - stay tuned for announcements soon! Have a nice New Year’s Eve; and stay with us!

I have been a freak of printing solutions for handhelds for a very long time(ever since TealPrint hit my Palm IIIc) - and naturally was very excited when I first heard about ActivePrint for PocketPC.

After having read the web site, I wanted to know more about what the app can do - here we have a little FAQ session with Charles W. Teel, the president of Pocket Watch:

Can ActivePrint print in color?
Yes, the only limitations are what your printer can do.

Can ActivePrint print without a PC?
ActivePrint gains its wide compatibility for documents and printers through the utilization of software on a Windows XP/Vista enabled desktop/laptop. As a result it does require the use of a desktop or laptop through your ActiveSync/Mobile Device Center connection, a TCP/IP or WiFi connection, or through the use of the ActivePrint ToGo add-on (comes with the Professional license).

Can other apps use ActivePrint to print their own data?
On Pocket PCs ActivePrint integrates with the Context Menu system in the File Explorer as well as the Document Lists of programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and RepliGo. There is also a .Net Compact Framework based SDK available which other developers can use to utilize the ActivePrint printing system from any .Net CF based application they write.

A review of this application is coming as soon as I am back in Vienna - should you have any questions now, just post a comment and I shall get them answered for you!

The Register reports that Palm will make its Windows Mobile 6 smartphone Treo 500v available in an unlocked state in January 2008.

While the machine has been available for quite some time(and even scored a mediocre review on TamsPPC); VodaFone has had an exclusive contract on the device so far. However, this exclusive contract is expiring - and Palm now makes the machine hit the road(big time).

As for the 500v itself, it is a rather uninspiring machine(especially due to its operating system - Windows Mobile for Smartphone is UGLY) - here are a few links to parts of our review containing further information(on the Vodafone model):
A look at Palm’s custom user interface
What the 500v ships with
500v body

I found out about a self diagnostic mode, which checks if some functions of the Axim are working properly. This mode is a little bit hidden, to access it, do the following:

Press Record + Power + Reset at the same time, then release only reset and keep the others pressed. Wait until the Self Diagnostic Screen appears.

Here is a little video at YouTube showing the Self Diagnostic mode. Feel free to leave some comments!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=a9G6ofn-y7M

800×480 screens are not unusual for WindowsCE-based systems(like the hp ipaq 310) - so far, PocketPC’s usually stuck to VGA screens for some reason or another. Anyways, Toshiba’s latest Portege clamshells bring along a screen at this oddball resolution, according to www.pdadb.net.

The rest of the system specs is ok, a 528MhZ Qualcomm MSM chipset has 256MB of ROM and 128MB of RAM. Both machines have a QWERTY keyboard and Wifi/BT/GSM radios.

The site has been able to get a detailed datasheet of both the G920 and its smaller, GPS-less sibling known as G910 - get the full scoop here:
G910 specs@pdadb.net
G920 specs@pdadb.net

The last part of the review is a video, which shows some of the functions of Opera Mobile. Head over to YouTube and have a look!

(In case the direct link isn’t working, search for “Opera Mobile 8.65 in action!”. My YouTube account name is “sepplmo”)

When a person who knows HP’s ipaq lineup for a long time looks at the 110; he immediately feels reminded of the original 3600/3700 series. These machines offered insane performance - but the flip side of the coin was a very bulky case. Is the 110 as bricky?

Compared to its predecessors, the 110 beats our trusty old 3700 in all aspects. It is smaller, thinner and lighter - but the screen still stays obscenely big. HP’s design masterpiece, the rx4240, is much smaller - but lacks the 5way navigator and the huge amount of screen real estate:

Palms business classic aka Palm TX is a bit bigger, but significantly thinner. The Treo 680 is less wide, but thicker:

The front of the 110 contains the four hardware buttons, 5way navigator, brightness sensor(top right) and dual LED’s for wireless and power supply state(top left):

HP moved the power button to the right side of the unit, and dropped the ‘long press-turns off backkight function’. The button has pretty good tactile feedback nevertheless. Reset and voice recorder buttons are right below:

Memory card slots are usually at the top of a device - HP decided to move the slot to the left side. The device ships with a dummy in the slot - this is no longer a mayor problem, as most users will stick in a fullsize SD card quickly(1gb costs like 7€ nowadays…):

The top of the device contains the headphone port; the bottom contains the miniUSB port and the microphone:

Pushing the button at the back of the unit allows you to slide the battery cover off the back - you can then swap out the battery(which is, incidentially, the same 1200mAH model found on the rx4240):

Last but not least, here”s a picture of the 110’s stylus next to a few other units:

Overall, HP has done a good job at modernizing the form factor of the 110. It keeps all the good features found on the 3xxx series(big screen,…) and is quite a bit smaller. Of course, consumer-oriented handhelds like the rx4240 are smaller and lighter - but the smallness is a significantly smaller screen…

A web site called “The Boy Genius report” has somehow managed to get their hands on a Motorola device running Windows Mobile Smartphone 6.1 - and posted a gallery containing over 100 screenshots here.

Compared to our own walkthrough of Windows Mobile 6.0 on the ipaq 514(complete with duffergile!), parts of the user interface look significantly flashier - but the long lists still remain unchanged(they now look a bit better, though).

While an operating system is not easy to judge by just looking at screenshots, I do not feel that Microsoft has overhauled any part of the user interface from a functional point of view. WM 6.0 made you scroll plain lists like hell - WM 6.1 will make you scroll colored lists instead…

Here are some pictures of the device I took awhile ago back in March. I will be taking more soon.

Let me start off this review by saying that it is an updated review of my old one. I did a review of this handheld back in March when I got the unit. This one will be a longer one with more detail. I will start this review a little different this time. I will start with the specifications of the device.

Wireless: Wi-Fi (802.11b), Bluetooth, serial IR

Operating system: Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC

Processor: Intel PXA270 processor 520 MHz

Memory: 192 MB total memory (128 MB ROM and 64 MB SDRAM)

Display: 3.5-inch transflective TFT QVGA color, 64K colors, LED backlight with power save mode.

Battery: User removable 3.7v 1440mAH battery

Expansion: Compact Flash (Type II) and Secure Digital card slots.

Audio: Internal microphone, speaker, and 3.5-millimeter stereo headphone jack

Dimensions: 4.71 x 3.01 x 0.65 inches / 119.4 x 76.6 x 16.3 millimeters (WxHxD)

Weight: 5.8 ounces / 164.4 grams

Warranty: 1-year parts and labor

In the Box: HP iPAQ hx2495 Pocket PC, USB desktop synchronization cradle, removable/rechargeable lithium-lon battery, AC adapter, charger adapter, stylus, protective plastic flip cover, product information guide, getting started disc

(Parts taken from Amazon)

The first part of Sebastian Sell’s review looked at the Opera Mobile browser in general. Part 2 focuses on tabbed browsing and resource consumption - read on to find out how much memory you will need for comfortable tabbed browsing!

tabbed browsing
Tabbed browsing is one of the main reasons, why you will prefer Opera Mobile. It’s possible to have several pages opened at the same time, to toggle between them just tap onto the title of the tab you want to open.

Also, I thought the resource consumption with more tabs opened would be interesting. Read the details in “Opera resource consumption”.

Opera settings
The settings of Opera Mobile can be found under Menu –> Tools –> Settings. In the first tap “General” it is possible to change the home page which should load up every time the browser is started. The “Identify as” option can be set to “Desktop computer” or “Handheld device”. To see the difference, try to visit “www.pdassi.de” in “Handheld device” mode first, then in “Desktop computer” mode. In the first case, the version which is optimized for mobile devices will be displayed, in the second you get the default, for desktop computer optimized page.

Opera comes with a build-in pop-up blocker, which can be either enabled or disabled in the settings. To clear the browsing history, cookies or cache, just navigate to the “History”-tab in the settings and hit the desired button. The cache size can be set here too, by default, it’s 8000 KB. The security protocols (SSL2, SSL3, TLS1) can be disabled in the “Security”-tab, they are by default enabled (recommended).

In the misc. settings tab, JavaScript, Plug-Ins, animations and cookies can be disabled. If Opera should be your default browser for opening web pages, just check the “Set Opera as default browser” checkbox if it isn’t already. Grab and scroll can either be enabled here or on any page, through the context menu (long tap onto the web site).

Opera resource consumption
I measured the RAM consumption with DinarSofts MemMaid:

note: this test was done with DSL 2000 KBit/s and the following settings: PIE: One Column, Text Size = Medium, High Resolution *not* enabled; Opera: Desktop Mode, High Resolution enabled, Zoom = 90%

Startup time Opera: 15.87 sec.
Startup time PIE: 04.75 sec.

Security
Opera supports the security protocols SSL 2, SSL 3 and TLS 1. I had no problems with any web site which requires SSL like Google Mail, or Avant Go. Unfortunately, the Opera Password Manager “WAND” is not included in the mobile version of Opera. Maybe they will add this feature in upcoming versions.

pros and cons
+ good CSS support
+ Flash Player compatible
+ “grab and scroll” feature
+ tabbed browsing
+ PIE Favorite Importer
+ full screen mode
- sometimes slow page rendering

Opera Browser for Pocket PC

Many of you might use the Opera Browser on the desktop PC. This review will show some features of the version 8.65 for Windows Mobile Devices.

Test system:
Dell Axim x51v

• 624 MHz Intel XScale PXA 270 processor
• 64 MB RAM
• 256 MB ROM
• Windows Mobile 6 Classic
• VGA Screen

page layouts
The Opera browser for Pocket PC can display web pages in two different modes: desktop mode and fit to screen mode.

In desktop mode, the web browser doesn’t change anything at the web site and the layout should be the same as on a desktop computer. Anyway, there are many pages which can’t be displayed, because the mobile browser’s CSS support isn’t by far as advanced as on a desktop.
The second display mode is called “Fit to screen”, and I would recommend this one for most of the sites. The browser resizes every site to fit to the screen of a Pocket PC, so that you only have to scroll up and down, but not left and right.

In every of these modes, it’s possible to zoom in and out in a range from 25% to 200 % zoom, as well as disable image loading for a lower traffic consumption. There is a full screen mode too, which hides the upper windows bar and the menu bar to have more room to display the webpage. The display can be rotated right out of the browser, just tap “Menu” –> “Display” –> “Landscape” to toggle between landscape and portrait mode. I have no idea if this works only for the WM5/WM6 version or for the WM 2003 version too. If you are owner of a WM2003 device, please try it out and post the result as a comment!

browser compatibility
For this, I visited http://aadmm.de and tried several things. According to this page, Opera handles CSS 1, 2.1 without problems (the basic things), but I wasn’t sure at CSS 3. Opera had trouble with JavaScript on a site, which could be handled without problems in PIE. Anyway, except the flash player, opera can not handle any other plug-ins like QuickTime, RealPlayer or Java (as far as I know). The flash player plug-in can be downloaded at the Adobe Homepage. After installing it, make sure “Enable Plug-Ins” under “Menu” –> “Tools” –> “Settings” –> “Misc.” is checked and restart the browser to enable the Flash Player. Opera Browser can even handle YouTube if you install it and set “Identify as” to “Desktop computer” - but don’t expect too much, it runs very slow and by far not every video is loading:

MyVideo doesn’t work at all. Compared to the Pocket Internet Explorer, Opera can display many sites correctly where the PIE failed, especially if CSS is used. Some pages, like Google Mail (the desktop PC HTML version) look ugly and become unusable because of text overlapping and other things (in both Opera and PIE).
(Opera Mobile)(Internet Explorer Mobile)

Downloads are handled different than in the PIE. When a download is started, the Opera download manager will open up where you can get an overview over the current downloads. You have the possibility to stop, resume or delete them. The download manager can be find under “Menu” –> “Tools” –> “Show Downloads”

An other interesting feature is the Favorite importer, which can be accessed under “Menu” –> “Tools” –> “Manage Bookmarks” –> “Menu” –> “Import IE Favorites”

Please tune in soon for Part 2 of the review - it will look at resource consumption, tabbed browsing and a variety of other fun topics!

While I myself am the exact opposite of a Mac head, Mac users will probably be very happy to hear that Mark/Space has just released an update to its Missing Sync application(an app that allows you to sync your PPC with your Mac).

Missing Sync 4.0.2 adds the following features:

• Compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
• Support for devices running Windows Mobile 6
• Sort, search, annotate, export call log history on the Mac
• View/search SMS message history on the Mac(not for Treo)
• Address Book integration for call log and SMS data
• Encodes and downloads video for mobile viewing
• Imports video from device separately from photos
• SyncMinder™ device management
• Interface improvements

People owning any 4.0.x version are entitled to a free upgrade, as are people who have purchased version 3.xx before the 1/June/2007. Owners of other Mark/Space products should refer to the update page for further information on pricing!

HP’s entire product line recently underwent a redesign in order to be more ‘consumer-friendly’ . This meant warm colours and easy-to-get-started-packaging for consumer handhelds like our rx4240. The 110; on the other hand; is targeted at business customers…let’s see if the usability improvements made it over.

When unpacking the 110, the box folds open and reveals a load of helpful information for first-time users:

After having unfolded the box, you find a package consisting of a small manual, various warranty-related papers and a slimmed-down software CD that no longer contains a full version of Outlook:

Removing this shrink-wrapped package grants you access to the ipaq and its charger/sync cable combination. HP repeated the classic faux-pas by using a nontransparent foil to cover the screen - other companies like Palm ship their devices with screen covers that can double as screen protectors:

As always, the battery is shipped outside of the machine. Removing the cardboard tray reveals the leather sleeve:

As for charging, this machine ships with the well-done charge/sync system already found on the rx4240 - no need to elaborate here:

In the end, the 110’s package contains everything you need to get started with your ipaq - but hp still didn’t improve on the small but annoying issues found in their last revision. While the lack of a headset is forgiveable for a business handheld, I can not understand why HP still doesn’t make the screen protector usable…

Tune in soon for a look at the 110’s size!