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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.

Consider two categories when looking at applications: those that come with the operating system and those that are provided by third parties. A number of applications come bundled with your iPAQ, including contact management, e-mail, notes, to-do lists, and calendaring software. Whether you prefer these built-in applications or third-party products will usually depend on what you used before you turned to your hand-held device. Users of Microsoft Outlook will likely appreciate the similarity between the Pocket Outlook features and those on their desktop. Pocket PC also comes standard with many other applications, including Pocket Excel, Pocket Word, and Pocket Internet Explorer. Each of the applications that come with Pocket PC will be addressed in detail in subsequent chapters. At a minimum, these applications allow easy access to your existing files, or to file attachments that arrive in your e-mail Inbox. The current version of Pocket PC does not include Pocket Money preinstalled like it was on the first versions of the Pocket PC operating system. Pocket Money can be downloaded for free at the Microsoft web site:
www.microsoft.com/MOBILE/pocketpc/downloads/money.asp. The Palm comes with basic contact management, calendaring, e-mail, and to-do list software as well. In addition, you can purchase third-party applications separately for the Palm that will allow you to do some rudimentary work with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, but these come at an additional cost and with limited functionality. Where the Palm really shines is in the variety of software designed for it; more than 10,000 third-party applications are currently available for the Palm. In contrast, fewer than half that many applications are currently available for the Pocket PC platform. The large number of Palm applications is a direct result of Palm’s early ability to grab market share and Windows CE’s previous inability to achieve significant market share. This ratio is coming down dramatically as consumers and businesses are buying more and more Pocket PCs. The quantity of third-party applications available for the Pocket PC platform is growing so quickly that it is getting very difficult to keep track of them all, and by some estimates, it now actually exceeds the number of Palm apps that are available. In other chapters of this book and on the www.PocketPCTools.com web site we will examine some of the best third-party applications that you can take advantage of to extend your iPAQ’s functionality.
Another element to consider is that some companies are currently working on Palm emulators for the Pocket PC that will allow you to run any Palm application on your Pocket PC device.
Although there will likely be little need to run Palm applications on a Pocket PC, and the legality of doing so is certainly questionable, should you locate a particular Palm app that you must have, with an emulator, you will be able to run it directly on your Pocket PC. A few companies have been working on emulators, but to date, no commercial emulator has ever been produced. With the increasing amount of Pocket PC-based software, we believe that a Palm emulator is becoming less and less valuable.

The ability for the processor to work on more than one task at a time is an important feature of the Pocket PC environment. For many day-to-day activities, this can be a mixed blessing. On your iPAQ, every time you launch a new application, the other application keeps running in the background, just as on your Windows desktop. However, because you don’t see the other applications, this can get a little confusing. Suddenly, you have several applications open and running at the same time. With a little practice, this isn’t hard to manage. The Palm OS, on the other hand, does not support multitasking, which means that every time you start a new application, that action effectively closes the previous application. This is a simple, tidy way to work and is very effective on a hand-held device, but can be limiting in more complex work environments. Multitasking can become an extremely valuable feature as you learn to expand your PDA experience beyond the basic built-in applications. For example, with multitasking, you can connect to your wireless provider and download your e-mail in the background while surfing the Web and pasting information from a web site into your Pocket Word document. This complex activity isn’t possible on the majority of the Palms currently in circulation. Palm’s latest OS5 release is technically multitasking, but they licensed the technology from a third party and are expressly forbidden as part of the agreement from exposing the multitasking capabilities to developers. This limits the ability to do multitasking on even the newest Palm platform.

The Pocket PC operating system is also designed to handle much larger memory allocations than the Palm. What this means to you is that you can work with larger files and more sophisticated programs that take more memory.
Early versions of the iPAQ came with 16MB or 32MB of RAM, but all of the models shipped since 2002 (3670 and 37xx, 38xx, 39xx, 54xx, 19xx series) come with 64MB of RAM standard, and many can be upgraded (by a third party) to up to 256MB of RAM. In comparison, the most powerful Palm devices come with 16MB of RAM.
The same comment can be made in the area of memory efficiency as was made about the processor. The Palm makes very effective use of its memory as far as applications go, whereas the Pocket PC and Pocket PC applications are often larger. However, when it comes to raw data (photos, music, documents), the memory usage is essentially the same.

First consider the processor. The top-end processor available right now for the iPAQ is the Intel XScale processor, which runs at 400 MHz (even the older line of iPAQs runs on the Intel StrongARM processor, which runs at 206 MHz). The top-end Palm Tungsten runs with a 200-MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 1510 processor. These units are not yet very common, and most people still run the older Palm V with a 40-MHz Motorola Dragonball processor. It is important to note that the Pocket PC OS was designed for a more generic processor and hardware combination and uses substantially more of the processor for basic overhead. The extra power available for the Pocket PC also correlates to faster battery drain on the Pocket PC devices. In general, your Pocket PC processor can do much more than a Palm OS processor, but at the cost of battery life.

Many years ago, Microsoft realized they would need to develop a lightweight operating system (OS) for non-PC devices.Without a clear picture of the kind of device that would use the new OS, it was difficult for Microsoft to move forward. At the time, futurists prognosticated a great deal about the impact of multimedia on our culture. This resulted in one group at Microsoft wanting to push Windows CE to become heavily multimedia oriented for use in television set–top boxes. A different group wanted to strip NT down to its bare bones and use that as the newWindows CE operating system.
In an attempt to bring some unity of vision to this area, Microsoft brought all these groups together in 1994 under the direction of Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg. This team realized that what was really needed was a new operating system, one that would be compatible with the existing and futureWindows operating systems, but would not necessarily be just a subset of them.This resulted in the development of Windows CE version 1.0, which appeared on the market in late 1996.
The team knew that if they were going to be successful in building a new operating system, it was critical that users not feel they were using a strange, new OS. This meant that the user interface had to mirror the already popularWindows 95 and use a similar desktop of icons as well as the start menu toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
The devices of this time were called hand-held personal computers (HPCs). They were extremely limited in capacity, with very little memory (usually 4MB or less), a small, grayscale screen, and a very limited processor that ran between 33 and 44 MHz. The limited power and storage capacity led to meager adoption of the initial Windows CE device, except among the most hardy computer enthusiasts. The average business user instead tended to adopt the more portable and easy to use competitor to the Windows CE platform, the Palm OS devices, such as the well-known Palm Pilot from 3Com and the Visor from Handspring.
The next generation of the CE platform was version 2.0, which came out in 1998. The devices that ran this operating system generally had double the CPU power and RAM of the earlier devices, and on top of that, many of these featured color screens.
Microsoft hoped that this new version of CE would provide greater competition to the very successful Palm Pilot line of PDAs. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be, as sales of the Windows CE 2.0 operating system were also very slow. Microsoft had also anticipated the accelerated adoption of portable computer systems in cars. The company had hyped its Windows CE 2.0 operating system as its answer to the expected surge of “Auto PCs” (a hand-held computer installed in any car in place of an existing stereo). Through a voice interface, drivers could request directions to any address in their Pocket Outlook contact list. The adoption of the Auto PC never happened (although some still think that this is yet to come).
Microsoft followed up Windows CE 2.0 with version 2.1, which was primarily aimed at
embedded developers. These developers were building applications that run on specialized devices, with the operating system embedded directly within their hardware. Examples of places where developers would use an embedded version of Windows CE would be customized gas monitors, hand-held inventory tablets, or point of sale (POS) systems. While all this development on Windows CE was going on, Palm OS–based devices continued to gain market share. Things were not looking good for Microsoft’s vision of a hand-held version of Windows.
Then in January 2000, Microsoft releasedWindows CE version 3.0. This product was dubbed the Pocket PC operating system. It overcame many of the limitations of the previous versions and also had the good fortune to come into existence when a new line of powerful processors was poised to come out of the gate. Intel’s StrongARM processor would give the new devices running the Pocket PC OS several times the CPU power of the most powerful Palm device at the time. Many of these devices were also equipped with at least twice, and sometimes as much as eight times, the memory of the most well-endowed Palms.
Sales of these Pocket PC–equipped devices began to pick up. The HP Jornada took an early lead, but the release of the Compaq iPAQ handheld set a new standard. Sales of the iPAQ have soared and show no signs of slowing.
The next chapter in the Pocket PC saga occurred in October 2001. Microsoft released the next version of their Windows CE operating system, dubbed Pocket PC 2002. The Pocket PC 2002 operating system featured an improved user interface, better character recognition options, enhanced Pocket Outlook features, expanded PocketWord and Pocket Excel features, Pocket Internet Explorer enhancements, Terminal Server, and more. A Pocket PC user could now expect more functionality than ever on such a compact device.
In 2002 something amazing happened. The two leaders in the Pocket PC field, HP and Compaq, merged. A great deal of confusion and concern arose among Pocket PC enthusiasts as to what this would mean. Would the HP Jornada line survive? The Compaq iPAQ? Would the two lines be “blended”? This confusion was enhanced by competitive offerings that were now hitting the market from Toshiba, NEC, Dell, and a host of other companies. The result of the HP/Compaq merger was that HP chose to keep the iPAQ line and rebranded it the HP iPAQ. With barely a hiccup, while the merger was occurring, HP shipped the new and improved 3900 series iPAQ. Before year’s end, they shipped the current lineup of the 1900 and 5400 series, demonstrating their continued dominance in this market and their ability to deliver superior products even in the face of increased competition.
What will the future hold for the iPAQ? We will look into the crystal ball later.
The entry of Dell into this space with their Axim Pocket PC has many analysts expecting a price war between these two powerhouses. Such competition usually benefits the consumer, as the companies increase the pace of innovation (to differentiate themselves from the competitor) and at the same time drive prices down. You can expect that, at a minimum, you will continue to see increasingly powerful machines—with longer lasting batteries, better screens, and more expansion capability—for lower prices.
In May 2003 Microsoft released the latest version of their Pocket PC operating system, called Pocket PC 2003. It features enhanced wireless support, improved integration for hardware with integrated cellular phones, more games, and personal software. In addition, many features are designed to make the Pocket PC platform more appealing to enterprises, such as remote provisioning, e-mail configuration, sync setup, device locking, and more. This book will focus primarily on the most recent versions of HP iPAQs that run the Pocket PC 2002 or Pocket PC 2003 operating systems.