First Pocket PC 2003 Details Surface

[Double-Trinity]

That actually depends more on the availability of such devices... Battery Life would be an issue with larger resolutions and displays...

I don't see why... the backlight is the main drain for screens, not the LCD, so moving to a VGA 4", a screen that could fit on most devices, or at LEAST an hVGA current-sized screen I wouldn't think would use that much moer power at all, since the backlight would be basically the same thing...

As for the OS lockign the resolutoin... why does everyone keep saying tihs? AFAIK, the only thing locking the resolution is that no Developers have made a non-QVGA screen yet... using the Nyditot screen rotator, which is a simple driver, I can actaully pencil in any resolution I want, I'lll just have to zoom, pan, and scan to see it all. But this alone proves that the OS does not lock the resolution, there is no UI to change it, but the option is there.

[imported_argent]

Originally posted by ctitanic
www.pc-counselor.com/review/

Isn't that:

http://www.pc-counselor.com/reviews/

And, by the way, your navigation bar came out looking REALLY weird in Safari... all scrunched up, I had to blindly mouse-over it until I got the right pulldown. It probably isn't easily navigable on a handheld either...

Here's the original review:

http://www.inges-pda.net/ppc2003_update1.html

[imported_argent]

I guess we'll start seeing 128M becoming the standard for Pocket PC:

A tip: Buy a SD card at least 64MB - pref. 128/256 and install all your programs on the card. It will make your Pocket PC run faster - cause it has more memory to run on. And you do not hear the female voice telling you: "Your memory is low"

Hopefully the vendors will figure out that there's no point in having all that RAM using power 24/7 and cutting into your battery life, and start providing either 2 slots or a built in 128M Flash chip internally (which will be faster, anyway).

With 128M of NAND Flash going for well under $20, that's got to be a cheap way to boost the system's specs.

[ctitanic]

Originally posted by argent
Isn't that:

http://www.pc-counselor.com/reviews/

And, by the way, your navigation bar came out looking REALLY weird in Safari... all scrunched up, I had to blindly mouse-over it until I got the right pulldown. It probably isn't easily navigable on a handheld either...

Here's the original review:

http://www.inges-pda.net/ppc2003_update1.html

Fixed, its www.pc-counselor.com/reviews/ and there you can read the answers to 10 questions I asked to the author of that review above mentioned by you.

The spanish version can be read here.

[imported_argent]

Originally posted by Double-Trinity
I don't see why... the backlight is the main drain for screens, not the LCD, so moving to a VGA 4", a screen that could fit on most devices, or at LEAST an hVGA current-sized screen I wouldn't think would use that much moer power at all, since the backlight would be basically the same thing...

For a given technology, the higher resolution the screen, the less area consists of pixels and the more consists of the dark spaces between the pixels. Which means the backlight has to be stronger to provide the same perceived brightness.

Of course you can go to a better manufacturing process for the higher resolution screen, but then that increases the cost... and in any case they're already using a good high quality process to get the best battery life from the current models.

As for the OS lockign the resolutoin... why does everyone keep saying tihs?

It's not the OS so much as the applications. Same reason there were problems when Palms first went to a higher resolution, many applications didn't work well on the higher resolution displays and the vendor (Handera) got the blame. Nobody wants to be the goat.

[Double-Trinity]

Originally posted by argent
For a given technology, the higher resolution the screen, the less area consists of pixels and the more consists of the dark spaces between the pixels. Which means the backlight has to be stronger to provide the same perceived brightness.

Of course you can go to a better manufacturing process for the higher resolution screen, but then that increases the cost... and in any case they're already using a good high quality process to get the best battery life from the current models.
It's not the OS so much as the applications. Same reason there were problems when Palms first went to a higher resolution, many applications didn't work well on the higher resolution displays and the vendor (Handera) got the blame. Nobody wants to be the goat.

That makes sense... although, I still think it would be worth it, the battery life on the Axim is good, and I know it woudl cost more, but selling a HiRes version of the Advanced would IMHO be a very good move... as for the apps, they could do the same or similar as palm:

1) Pixel Doubling, palm basically jumped from 160x160 -> 320x320, the same could be done from qVGA to full VGA.
2) for applicatoins that aren't fixed size, like pocket Word, and others, well, they already fill the full size of teh screen (as shown by when youchange the resolution with a 3rd party app), and you could just simply use different zoom levels to have the same-sized letters, only sharper.
3) Use large icons for the most part across the OS, that way it would appear the same size as before for clickablity, but look a great deal better. Same with system text. The system text can already be changed, but the icons would be a nice, logical step as well. Maybe a slight screen increase, and a 150% size for toolbars etc. would be good.
4) Offer a "fit to screen" for today images, that would stetch the old 240x320 ones, and compress the new ones, or allow them as native (I do this now, with a 3rd party .tsk builder that is a simple command-line app, and just have multiple versions of mine)

But applications like GSPlayer, calculator apps, and others that use floating windows would be a lot more useful, you'd b eable to get away with having floating windows easier with sharper resolutoin, and the power of windows could be greater enabled through this.

Microsoft could simply have a "high res" shell they deliver in some units. This will need to be done sooner or later, since screens will get cheaper and more efficient to make, and PPC will fall behind.

[imported_argent]

After a bit of email conversation with Inge Wallumrod, I have some good news and some bad news.

Good news: they don't seem to have mucked around with the character recogniser. I was afraid they might make it emulate Graffiti-2.

Bad news: they don't seem to have mucked around with the VPN and proxy mess.

*sigh*

It's nice that they've improved the wireless lan situation, but it would be nicer if they'd done it by fixing the network configuration mess instead of just including an 802.11 client.

It's also occurred to me that the 802.11 clients in PPC2002 are provided by the network vendors, which means that the things Inge saw clould have been something Compaq provided for the iPaq he's using and may not necessarily be there for third party network cards, *or* if Microsoft's doing that part of the software now they may need new drivers.

[cideo]

SKOOBOUY vga resolution means four times the processing power which means something radical has to change in terms of processors that can't even match the performance of the technology it replaced a year ago.

DOUBLE-TRINITY Doubling the resolution would solve the VGA problem however that still would have a processor overhead and an added power drain. Also you then get into needing two resolutions for some applications to say nothing of much larger files for any graphics or video files compressed for that resolution and the added processor overhead to work the pixels. Bottom line is we still can't reach QVGA with fullframerate MPEG without restricting the datarate or decimation.


ANDRELWOOD Microsoft is on record here at Brighthand through Derek Brown saying the OS would not be optimized for XScale for another two to three generations of XScale processor. That is probably in line with two to three years to the next major OS upgrade.

BOMBADIL (or anyone who knows) would you please explain exactly what the NET Compact Framework is and how it relates to PPCs? VB. NET / CE. NET / Visual Studio .NET / C#.NET - all I have seen are vague descriptions. Here is one: "The .NET Compact Framework is a key part of realizing Microsoft's goal to provide customers with great experiences any time, any place, and on any device."

PETVAS says "Pocket PC 2003 is based on Windows Ce.Net 4.1." Fine I still would like to know what in the heck this actually means.

SCOTT R the close/kill function is important because of extreme operations like decoding video and audio. If you are saying the OS should be able to intelligently switch processor resources fine, but it SEEMS that with five or ten programs open, SOMETHING will be affected enough to lower performance even with a special OS switching function. I think a Close/Kill button is mandatory until the OS can actually "park" an application. As far as the MVPs, they are under ND and that is the reason they can't talk about what they have seen until MS gives them clearance. Maybe all Brighthand users should apply for MVP status, then we wouldn't all be left hanging...

KLAUE MS really doesn't seem to care about the PPC much anymore, so any information on a company that does would be appreciated.

GENERAL COMMENT: Everyone is always talking about video at Brighthand but it was never mentioned once in this thread. XScale and the stated lack of MS support set video back years on the PPC - I wonder why no one was concerned here?

[Scott R]

Originally posted by Gamma Ray
SKOOBOUY vga resolution means four times the processing power which means something radical has to change in terms of processors that can't even match the performance of the technology it replaced a year ago.

It's probably not that bad. Keep in mind that the first Palm OS devices to implement pixel-doubling were pre-OS5 Sony devices running the 33MHz processor. While I never owned one myself, I don't recall hearing people complain that it was noticeably slower than an equivalent 160x160 device, let alone 1/4 the speed.

Originally posted by Gamma Ray
ANDRELWOOD Microsoft is on record here at Brighthand through Derek Brown saying the OS would not be optimized for XScale for another two to three generations of XScale processor. That is probably in line with two to three years to the next major OS upgrade.

Actually, there are supposed to be some hooks built into PPC 2003 to allow developers to optimize their code for XScale. However, they'll have to create two versions of their code because if they do it, the apps won't be compatible with non-XScale devices, which is funny when you consider how much they were touting the standardization on StrongARM back with the release of PPC 2002.

Originally posted by Gamma Ray
BOMBADIL (or anyone who knows) would you please explain exactly what the NET Compact Framework is and how it relates to PPCs?

The .NET CF is basically a runtime library (DLL) that resides on the PPC. It has a lot of commonly used functions, etc. that applications built with the .NET tools can make use of. It's the same idea behind the Visual Basic runtime DLL that resides on desktops. It's relatively heavy though the idea is that the apps themselves will be lighter (we'll see). If you have any experience with the Palm OS, it's a similar concept to the AppForge runtime (whatever they call that). Personally, I'm not so sure that burning it into ROM is such a good idea (at least not yet). Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the CF just made their debut. I'd imagine there will be a couple of service packs and fixes to the CF runtime before things are super stable. Hopefully devices with it burnt into ROM will still have that ROM be flashable.

Originally posted by Gamma Ray
PETVAS says "Pocket PC 2003 is based on Windows Ce.Net 4.1." Fine I still would like to know what in the heck this actually means.

As far as I'm concerned, it just means that it's using a newer version of the CE core OS. I don't get easily impressed with version numbers. Let's see what it can do for me.

Originally posted by Gamma Ray
SCOTT R the close/kill function is important because of extreme operations like decoding video and audio. If you are saying the OS should be able to intelligently switch processor resources fine, but it SEEMS that with five or ten programs open, SOMETHING will be affected enough to lower performance even with a special OS switching function. I think a Close/Kill button is mandatory until the OS can actually "park" an application.

I'm not arguing against the idea of being able to close an application, just against the idea of dedicating a piece of the precious screen real estate to a button whose only purpose is to close (and not really close - just minimize) the current app. As I said, I don't think that closing the current app is a common enough task that I want to waste screen real estate on it. I'd rather they use that spot for a drop-down menu of running tasks so that I can close another resource-consuming app that is slowing down the app I'm currently trying to use. This same menu would double as a task-switcher so I can switch between apps quickly. The functionality I just described is already available in the freeware PocketNav. But no one should have to add it in. MS needs to integrate this as part of the core OS/GUI.

Scott

[imported_argent]

Originally posted by Scott R
It's probably not that bad. Keep in mind that the first Palm OS devices to implement pixel-doubling were pre-OS5 Sony devices running the 33MHz processor. While I never owned one myself, I don't recall hearing people complain that it was noticeably slower than an equivalent 160x160 device, let alone 1/4 the speed.

Yeh, but they did it in hardware, so the processor just saw a 160x160 windows.

Undoubled applications were slower, often noticably so.

I'm not arguing against the idea of being able to close an application, just against the idea of dedicating a piece of the precious screen real estate to a button whose only purpose is to close (and not really close - just minimize) the current app.

Well, it's also the "OK" button. In fact that's what it's really supposed to be. Originally this spot would have had the "OK" and "CANCEL" buttons, but Microsoft decided that since the Palm apps frequently didn't have cancel buttons (because changes were made in the DB in realtime, so there was no point in cancelling) they would get rid of them as well... without actually giving you the realtime update that made it meaningful.

In PPC2000, that's all it was, the "OK" button.

In PPC2002 they added this "minimize" feature in response to the complaints that we needed to close applications. I rather thought, and most people I've spoken to agree, that they missed the whole point.

And by getting rid of the cancel and close buttons they ended up with applications taking up extra screen and menu space with cancel and close buttons elsewhere. Which rather defeats the purpose of the "ok" button to begin with.

PLUS, now you getin the habit of tapping (X) to pop back to the previous app you were working on, but in Microsoft's apps that closes your current document because that's what "OK" did in PPC2000.

It's a big mess.

I expect them to change it shortly after Apple starts shipping two-button mice. These kinds of design decisions acheive religious proportions...