The Pocket PC can be expanded through one of four standards (or any combination) depending on your hardware options. The most common expansion technique is through CompactFlash (CF) cards and Secure Digital (SD) cards. The SD card, the size of a postage stamp, is the smaller of the two. The CF card is slightly larger, but boasts a very impressive range of accessories in its format, including digital cameras, miniature hard drives, GPS units, and much more. All of the current lines of iPAQs contain built-in SD expansion slots, although the older 31xx, 36xx, and 37xx series units have no SD support whatsoever. The iPAQ handhelds use an expansion sleeve (a hardware add-on that allows for expansion of the iPAQ platform) to support CompactFlash (with the exception of the H1910, which doesn’t support any expansion sleeves).
Another option for expanding your Pocket PC is through PCMCIA. This is the PC card
standard that has been used in laptop computers for many years. This means that if you have a PCMCIA slot or expansion sleeve on your Pocket PC device, you can use almost any card that your notebook computer uses. You can share your modems, network cards, wireless accessories, VGA display adaptors, and a plethora of other tools.
The third option is available integrated within the higher-end iPAQs such as the 3870/75, 3970/75, and H5450. These units have built-in support for the new Bluetooth standard. Bluetooth is a short-range, low-power, wireless networking and connectivity protocol that allows your iPAQ to communicate with any other Bluetooth-enabled device. For example, if you have a Bluetooth-compatible phone, your iPAQ could (with add-on dialer software) automatically look up and dial numbers of contacts in your address book on your cellular phone. This feature also allows you to synchronize your iPAQ without having to plug it into a sync cable (as long as the host PC is Bluetooth enabled). The use of Bluetooth is spreading rapidly, which will result in many other ways for you to use your iPAQ without wires, such as navigating with a Bluetooth GPS, printing to any printer, surfing the Internet from a public Bluetooth node, sharing notes or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with other Bluetooth iPAQs and devices, and much more. If you have an iPAQ that doesn’t feature built-in Bluetooth support, you can add it through the CF or SD slots (except on the H1910 model, which only supports storage of data though its SD slot). The combination of CompactFlash, PCMCIA, Secure Digital, and Bluetooth means that you will have a tremendous range of expansion and connectivity options on your iPAQ. When comparing this with the Palm, we see that early versions of the Palm device had little expandability, but third-party licensees of the Palm technology, such as Handspring and Symbol, added to the expandability of the hardware. Handspring was one of the first to introduce hardware expansion through their proprietary Springboard module. You could plug in third-party modems, pagers, GPS units, and more. Later versions of the Palm have adopted the Secure Digital format to allow for expandability. The SD format is growing, but still has limited support for more than file storage and Bluetooth connectivity at present, in contrast to the widely supported CompactFlash format.

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