Accessing the Pocket PC on a PC ? comparing the three solutions

[Menneisyys]

Accessing the Pocket PC on a PC ? comparing Pocket Controller, dotPocket and ActiveSync Remote Display

The question of accessing a Pocket PC device through ActiveSync (or, more generally, through any kind of wireless/wired connection) is being asked at several boards all the time so I deemed it important to devote a fully-fledged comparative (!) roundup with some benchmark figures to the subject.

There're several ways of displaying and manipulating the Pocket PC screen on the desktop over an ActiveSync and/or, as with more advanced solutions, a TCP/IP connection. Aside from slow(ish) solutions like running a VNC server on the PDA, these are as follows:

- SOTI Pocket Controller (from now on: SOTI; current version: 5.02): clearly the best, most powerful (except for the lack of a Nyditot-alternative), fastest solution. Flawlessly works with VGA PDA's (from version 4.12), even over TCP/IP connections (read: fast Wi-Fi) and has a lot of additional goodies.

If you have a VGA device, you?ll certainly need at least version 4.12. 5.0+ is not much better than 4.12, speed- and basic operability-wise; it has some welcome goodies like Smoothing in zoomed-in modes that can be disabled (with 4.12, it was always on, making zoomed screen snapshots quite fuzzy) and a new ?Start? button on the main screen so that you don?t need to press F5 to start communication and some other new features. If you don?t need these new features, you may find version 4.12 fast and usable enough, even with VGA devices.

Differences between 5.01 and the recently-released 5.02 are minor. There?re, however, some important bugfixes in 5.02 affecting the Landscape mode with VGA devices (it still worked with 4.12); therefore, for VGA users, upgrading to version 5.02 is a must.

Please note that switching on the video acceleration on your PDA (the icon in the lower right corner or the Settings/System/Pocket Controller applet/Configure/Video/Mode ? switching on Turbo Mode in the desktop component, in Tools/Configure/General/Turbo Mode, won?t cause problems) may result in a need for hard reset. I (as with some other PL720 owners) had to hard reset my PDA because of this (tested the most recent version, 5.02). On the iPAQ 2210, I had no such problems. However, enabling video acceleration didn?t seemingly accelerate the 2210 further.

You may also want to read the Dave's iPAQ review of version 5.01. It has a lot of screenshots (therefore, I didn?t bother making screenshots myself) and other good stuff.

- dotPocket. It's clearly worse than Pocket Controller with VGA devices and, in my opinion, isn't worth its price (US$ 25, as opposed to the US$ 30.95 of Pocket Controller) if you have a VGA device. If you still have it lying around and, therefore, do not end up paying for it, it may be useful, though - it's still better and faster than the ActiveSync Remote Display. As of version 2.1, it supports VGA devices.

If you, however, have a WM2003 QVGA device and don?t want to purchase the NYDITOT Virtual Display, but you need its functionality, you may give this application a closer look.

You may also want to read the pocketnow review of the app. Interestingly, it writes version 3.0 in the title ? it may have been an oversight. You may also want to check out some other reviews here. Interestingly, it doesn?t list the Silicon Valley Pocket PC review, which is also worth reading.

- ActiveSync Remote Display, part of Microsoft's PowerToys: free, but clearly inferior to the two above programs: for example, it doesn't even support shared, synchronized clipboards (a very important feature in any program that accesses a Pocket PC). Therefore, I won?t directly compare it to the two commerical applications; only in the closing feature comparison table.

By default, ActiveSync Remote Display isn?t VGA-aware, you will have to force it into the VGA mode based on the FAQ of ctitanic, author of Tweaks2k2; or, if you prefer an easier way of doing this, with Tweaks2k2 itself or with other tools like Mad Programmer's Force Hi-resolution tool. As you may guess after reading my article on relocating the three applications from the main memory, you?ll need to force cerdisp2.exe into VGA.

So, what's the difference between the two commercial programs?

First, the speed of accessing VGA devices. The SOTI application is much faster on VGA devices; not only at controlling the Pocket PC itself, but also when you directly control your Pocket PC while the remote controller application is running. Then, the PDA remotely controlled by the SOTI app doesn?t noticeably slow down; the dotPocket-controlled PDA, on the other hand, does. The difference is clearly visible.

I?ve also made a demo video on the access speed difference on VGA devices of the two applications. Please note that the codec used for capturing video was a plain desktop Windows codec and can only be played under Windows; if you want to play it on your PDA, with the infamous TCPMP (tested with version 0.66), you?ll need to download this, considerably larger version of the video.

I ran the two applications parallelly, in two separate windows (it didn?t decrease the access speed with either applications noticeably), and made the video with SnagIt, with 25 fps. The dotPocket window is on the left, while the SOTI window is on the right. You should pay special attention to the animated ActiveSync arrows. The difference in speed speaks for itself.

Fine-tuning the video refresh rate (more on this later), disabling encryption and optimizing for slow connections don?t help much either.

Please note that all the above only concerns VGA devices. On QVGA devices, the dotPocket speed is pretty good (albeit still considerably slower than that of the SOTI app).

Unfortunately, goodies in dotPocket like enabling File/Properties/Grab Method/Direct Video Memory Access (DMA) doesn't work on VGA devices: it switches to QVGA and, what is more, completely messes up everything. Fortunately, unlike with SOTI, I didn?t end up having to hard reset my Pocket Loox 720?

DMA works with QVGA devices though. As I could see, however, it didn?t really increase the speed with my iPAQ 2210 ? the dotPocket running at 150 ms refresh rate, the SOTI app was still faster. In this, the dotPocket app is like the SOTI app: both seem to have problems with VGA devices, as long as video acceleration is concerned.

The image/video playing capabilities of dotPocket are also a bit inferior to those of SOTI as far as output file formats / video codecs are concerned.

First, the former, dotPocket, can only save to BMP?s and doesn?t have a keyboard shortcut to do this (you will always need to go to the menu ? two clicks instead of a much faster keyboard shortcut). SOTI, on the other hand, also supports JPG and GIF (the latter still needs to be compressed though ? this is pretty easy if you have ImageMagick around. I?ve described this problem and the ImageMagick-based solution to that here).

Second, while with SOTI, during video recording, you can use any pre-installed codec on your Windows desktop, that?s not possible with the dotPocket app ? you will only be able to use its default encoder, and not your (much better and more efficient) codec of choice.

Please note that these problems are not that crucial and shouldn?t be a showstopper with dotPocket, unless you really need the fastest way of capturing PPC screens and/or don?t want to do any kind of post-processing (which must however be done with SOTI to reduce its GIF sizes if you keep using it in GIF capture mode; or convert them to PNG; here I assume you don?t want to capture JPEG images at all). Post-processing is really only a nuisance with videos because, to my knowledge, they can?t be as easily automatizable (just run a batch file to convert) as converting image files (I may be wrong though).

SOTI also has some other, non-cruical, goodies like, for example, System Info, a remote process viewer (it?s also capable of actually killing processes, unlike, for example, the PHM Task Manager) and a remote DOS box (which is almost useless, compared to real console applications ? it doesn?t support any kind of scripting support etc.) Also, Overlay Drawing. the ability to edit the keyboard shortcuts to make menu navigation even more unnecessary and Sync Manager (the latter can be made unnecessary with free (!) alternatives like MobSync though) are pretty welcome additions.

There?re some advantages of dotPocket over SOTI, though. First, the NYDITOT Virtual Display-like client on the PDA. I?ve made some tests with it on my iPAQ 2210 (didn?t do the same with my VGA Pocket Loox 720 because it doesn?t need a portrait vs. landscape tool because of the operating system) and was pretty happy with it. It worked flawlessly in all my tests.

Second, it has a built-in file transfer utility. It has a tolerable speed, about 11% less than the standard ActiveSync file copy speed with either the standard Explorer or using the Total Commander with the WinCE FS plug-in , counted in the speed hit introduced by running dotPocket itself.

Third, you can also record videos with dotPocket that also show the mouse cursor. This is not possible with the SOTI app. (The latter, however, is able to insert title/trailer frames into the stream so you won?t need to postprocess your captured videos to insert them.)

Some technical and benchmark data in tabulated form

Please click here to see it because I couldn?t include HTML forms in a public forum and I didn?t want to convert it to a < PRE > table because of the hassles involved.

A side note for the table: I?ve measured the slowdown factor this after starting the application by transferring a 2.44 Mbyte through ActiveSync to the main memory (I haven?t used Card Export II, which undoubtedly would have shown much more pronounced differences), under exactly the same circumstances. Without running any of the three apps, the file was uploaded in 9.6 seconds (255 kbytes/s) on the PL720 and 8.3 secs (295 kbytes/s) on the iPAQ 2210. I?ve re-measured the transfer speed of the same file after starting all of the three apps one by one. As can clearly be seen, on a VGA device dotPocket really slows down the connection with the default settings; with setting the screen refresh rate to 1 fps (which, with VGA devices, isn?t worse than the default setting, usability-wise), however, the slowdown decreased to 4%. Therefore, if you use dotPocket with a VGA device, you should go to File/Properties at once and set ?Send timeout (s)? to 1 sec as soon as possible.

On QVGA devices, there weren?t so big differences.

Also, you may want to read my article on relocating the three applications from the main memory if you (would like to) want to decrease their RAM memory usage.

Bottom line:

There is no clear winner. Both the SOTI and the dotPocket applications have its strengths as far as previous-generation (read: no built-in lanscape support) QVGA devices are concerned. When it comes to VGA devices, however, I think, the SOTI app is the only real alternative because of its speed.

Broken down:

- if you use a WM2003 QVGA device, as simple remote controller tools, all the three apps are tolerably fast (with SOTI being the fastest, but the two are pretty usable too). The dotPocket price, as it contains a Nyditot alternative, can be pretty good cost/performance wise (you won?t need to buy Nyditot!), especially if you don?t need the bells and whistles of the SOTI application.
- if you use a VGA device,
1. you will already have built-in Landscape support in your operating system (except for the old WM2003 Toshiba e800?s, if you, due to the screen refresh problems, don?t upgrade them to WM2003SE), so, the additional capabilities of dotPocket won?t really interest you. On VGA devices, I?d say it?s only the SOTI application that can be used without major heart attacks because of the very slow response times.
2. if you still plan to use dotPocket, to avoid its connection (and the PPC itself!) being considerably slowed down, lower the refresh rate from 6.2/3 fps to one. It, however, won?t speed up its access speed.
3. don?t forget to apply the Forced VGA patch to the Microsoft application if you still prefer that to the other two!

EDIT: 18/Jul/2005 11:30 CET: added a lot of new stuff (for example, URL?s to other reviews) to the article; cleaned up the English a bit.

[Menneisyys]

Please note that SOTI 5.02 has problems with all VGA devices, video acceleration-wise; please see http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/foru...c.php?p=355369 on this (the victim is a x50v user now). That is, never try to enable video acceleration on VGA devices - it will result in a hard reset!

Also, a little correction: I've been told by Jon Westfall over at Pocket PC Thoughts that the SOTI app is also able to record the mouse pointer movement in videos. BTW, my article has become front-paged at PPCT ( http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/foru...c.php?p=355320 ).

[ctitanic]

Another good article this one!

[Fedorov]

Great article, many thanks for your thoroughness/testing - not heard of DotPocket, I purchased SOTI's product a few months ago for use in demonstrations on an OHP and it is great, doesn't really get stress-tested, does it's job and worth every penny

Thanks again

Fedorov.

[Menneisyys]

Some new additions:

After I've been told over at iPAQ HQ that a hx4700 was able to restart after 10 or some soft resets and a great deal of waiting, I've continued playing with my VGA PDA. Interestingly, now it didn't have any problems when I switched to accelerated mode. I've tested this with both version 5.01 and 5.02.

I've made two example videos of the AS arrows using the enabled/disabled video modes: non-accelerated; accelerated. (Please note that TCPMP won't be able to play them and I didn't make a TCPMP version!).

I may come up with some reproducable, quantitive measurement of the speed gain of the acceleration. So far, I've mostly used the number of the Start Menu opening phases for this (which, with QVGA devices, has been two, in both modes), which isn't the best.

Bottom line: acceleration may work on your VGA PDA. Do, however, backup your PPC before enabling it!


I?ve also played a bit with the built-in transfer tools of both dotPocket and the SOTI app and found out that:

- the WinCE FS plug-in of Total Commander (from now on: TC) is definitely slower than transferring files through Windows File Explorer (from now on: FE). This is true with not accessing the PDA at all too (see the ?nothing? rows in the list below!)
- FE is much less prone to slowdowns because of another application?s actively using the USB than TC (see the dotPocket results!)
- The built in Explorer of the SOTI (from now on: SE) app is very good and, what is even more important, even faster than FE. Its only downside is the lack of any kind of progress bar.
- The dotPocket File Explorer (from now on: DE) has a bug: when there is not enough space on the target drive, DE leaves its progress bar on the screen; the entire file transfer window must then be closed. There?re other bugs with the progress bar too: upon transferring large files, it stops showing anything (as with the dotPocket main window ? it just becomes stalled), giving the impression it?s stalled, if you switch to another application and then back. The file, however, is getting copied in the background.
- DE is also definitely slower than even TC (not to mention FE)
- Also, common shortcuts like the Del/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V key don?t work at all in the DE window. They work great in SE.

Bottom line: the built-in File Explorer in SOTI is faster than even Windows File Explorer (assuming SOTI is running in the background). The built-in File Explorer in dotPocket, however, is slower than even the Total Commander plug-in. It is also bad news that the Total Commander plug-in (my preferred way of transferring files) is slower than Windows File Explorer.

Please note that these are USB results only; through Wi-Fi, the differences may be even more pronounced.

Benchmark results in transferring a 33Mbyte text file to Main Memory (on a Pocket Loox 720) through USB. All results are in minutes:seconds.

nothing, FE: 1:43
nothing, TC: 2:03

SOTI, enabled video acc., FE: 2:23
SOTI, enabled video acc., TC: 2:44
SOTI, enabled video acc., SE: 2:06

dp, 150 ms, FE: 2:06
dp, 1000 ms, FE: 2:02
dp, 150 ms, TC: 3:02
dp, 1000 ms, TC: 2:54
dp, 150 ms, DE: 3:23
dp, 1000 ms, DE: 3:12

[Menneisyys]

Originally posted by Fedorov
Great article, many thanks for your thoroughness/testing - not heard of DotPocket, I purchased SOTI's product a few months ago for use in demonstrations on an OHP and it is great, doesn't really get stress-tested, does it's job and worth every penny

Thanks again

Fedorov.

Thanks to the both of you

[Menneisyys]

The SOTI acceleration really works on some devices! Read on!

I?ve written a small app to make measuring the graphical performance of any Pocket PC remote controller app a breeze. As usual, it?s a free download; so is the source code for c0d1ng fr34kz . It?s just a counter with large letters, counting to 300 after starting it with the Start! button. Please note that it?s a very simple app ? I didn?t bother making it fail-safe etc.

I?ve captured the videos again with SnagIt, with the Microsoft Video 1 codec (sorry, it?s a desktop-only codec), under exactly the same circumstances. I recorded all videos with 100 fps (the effective rate is about 80 fps with all the clips). You can find the SOTI (both the accelerated and the non-accelerated) videos here, the DotPocket videos here and the MS ActiveSync Remote Display here. I?ve only captured videos from the Pocket Loox 720.

How the test videos should be evaluated? On a frame-to-frame basis (preferably in a video viewer that supports frame-to-frame advancing and frame counting; for example, VirtualDub ? with Windows Media Player, it?s much more complicated to evaluate the videos), if you?re unsure. That way, you?ll see which app delivers all of the drawn frames to the desktop (SOTI in accelerated mode), which about 50% (SOTI in standard mode and DotPocket in 50ms mode ? please, again, note that using the latter mode in DotPocket, the PPC will be at least 1-2 orders of magnitude slower!), and which about 20-25% (MS ActiveSync Remote Display).

Remarks:

- the SOTI acceleration indeed works! (Note that this video is taken with the beta version of the forthcoming 5.3, which has been provided to me, along with the serial number, by SOTI Inc. Thanks for that!)
- when there is small changing area on the screen, DotPocket is faster than in the 1000ms case if you set the framegrabbing rate to 50-150 ms. Then, however, the PPC becomes much more sluggish (just compare the time needed for stepping, say, 100 forward with the 1000ms and the 50ms case!)

[Menneisyys]

Soti Pocket Controller 5.5 build 833 review: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/ind...3&p=474&more=1

[MrWhipple]

rCE is freeware, but very slow.

[Menneisyys]

A brand new article has been published with a lot of new info (particularly: WM5 compliance, Pocket PC-based VNC servers etc) on remote controlling of Pocket PC's. It can be read at http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/ind...3&p=514&more=1 , in my Pocket PC Magazine Expert Blog.