My HP iPAQ h2210/h2215 Pocket-PC!
03/22/2004 - I've had some crazy experiences with my iPaq lately. Firstly, Symbol FINALLY FINALLY released a driver for their CF 802.11b Wi-Fi card. About damned time! But it really seems to suck (not just me, my buddy has had the problem too). One day I woke up (I didn't charge my PocketPC that night) and it was DEAD. I plugged it in, and it did a hard-reset! SHIT! Luckily I learned my lesson last month and I had a backup. I reapplied the backup, and off I went. So anyway, time went on, and then my SD and CF slots went on the blitz. Damn it! What is with me and these damned ports/slots! Sucks. Anyway, I'm not ready for an upgrade, so I called HP. It was amazing. They overnighted me a box. I dropped my iPaq in the box, and mailed it off. I had it in my hands on the morning of the second day. WOW. 48-hour turnaround. I was so happy! HP is great!
02/06/2004 - I had convinced my buddy to get an iPaq, and on the way home I decided to take out my battery and put it in his brand spanking new unit so we could try it out. It worked just fine, but when I put my battery back into my iPaq, I got the hard-reset screen. OUCH. I do not know what happened. For whatever reason, my backup battery failed. 95% of my data is stored in a code-wallet pro encrypted file, and that's backed up religiously (was backed up that morning, in fact), so I wasn't that bad off. BUT, my calendar was lost. That REALLY sucked. Because I use Linux most of the time, I rarely sync my PocketPC. And because ActiveSync is such a piece of crap, I REALLY rarely sync my PocketPC. And because MS Outlook is a seriously bloated piece of crap, the last time I synced my calendar via ActiveSync to Outlook was a VERY long time ago. Ouch. Had to piece my calendar together from scratch. Sucks. Important events, birthdays, ugh. Anyway, obviously I didn't want this to happen again, so I finally checked out the built-in iPaq backup program. I should have done this a long time ago, but if you've ever read my adventures with my Casio E-200 backup program, you'd understand my hesitation. So I'm checking out the built-in iPaq backup program, and it looks VERY cool! You can choose the different stuff you want to backup (for instance, sometimes I JUST want to backup the PIM databases, not the files... I can do that!). Very cool. And what's even cooler is that you can set it up so that the iPaq backup program runs BY ITSELF on a daily basis! COOL! Cool... except for the fact that it really doesn't work as advertised. Since I've enabled the iPaq Backup program to run on a schedule, damn near NONE of my alarms work correctly. It's stopped waking me up in the morning most of the time (thankfully my cell phone is 100% reliable at that). Sometimes when I go to use the iPaq for the first time in the morning, that's when it'll start the backup. And, of course, when it's done, it turns off the PDA. Sucks. But I guess it's MUCH better than nothing. And now that I have a 256MB SD card (which I got for XMAS), I have the iPaq backup program set to automatically backup to that. Awesome. Hopefully I'll never by caught in this situation. Of course, if you've been keeping track of my adventures, you'd know this will happen again, and again, and again :).
02/06/2004 - For XMAS I got a 256MB SD card and the seriously cool HP iPaq clip-on thumb keyboard. This thing is awesome! It just slides on the bottom of the iPaq (covering the buttons), and you just use your thumbs to type. Once you get used to it, it runs pretty well. And the keyboard is small enough to fit in my pocket. It works GREAT for entering lots of text (which I do almost on a daily basis).
08/31/2003 - Well, that figures, a month and I don't post. I'm still using the h2210 and still loving it. In fact, I recently had the chance to test out the bluetooth and SD functions of the unit. A buddy bought a Nokia 3650, which has bluetooth stuff built-in. Awesome! I wasn't able to get it to get my PocketPC on the Internet with it (I think I can do it, but the phone itself had a browser, and we were messing with that), but I did get a lot of bluetooth stuff done. One thin I'm noticing about the h2210 is that the screen isn't as scratch resistant as my old Casio E-200. I'm going to have to get some screen protectors SOON. Other than that, the unit goes through a daily beating and so far works great. In fact, I was able to go to Best Buy and buy an open-boxed serial cable (USB/serial actually) for only $10. $10, WOW. Not just the price, but the fact that I could go to the store and buy an accessory for the h2210 was great. I was able to get my GPS hooked up with-out problems.
08/31/2003 - Adding to the above, I've been quite pleased with my E&B charging stuff. The cable that comes with the E&B charging stuff is USB only, but I was able to use the E&B charger with this new USB/serial cable that I got from Best Buy. In addition, I was to hook up BOTH my serial GPS AND the E&B charger at the same time. That was great! I used it to drive to Chicago. Pretty cool. Well, anyway, I'm still quite happy with my HP iPAQ h2210 PocketPC!
07/25/2003 - Another note, the HP iPAQ h2210 and the HP iPAQ h2215 ARE THE SAME EXACT MODEL... it's just that HP named them differently to distinguish between the ones THEY (HP) sell, and the ones you buy at the store. I've read this on a couple of sites. I think the h2210 is the one HP sells, and the h2215 is the one you get at the store.
07/25/2003 - One major thing I forgot to mention last night... the h2210/h2215 has a consumer IR device built-in. What's that mean? Not only does it do the regular IR data transfer, BUT IT WILL ALSO CONTROL YOUR TV/VCR/DVD/SAT, etc...! WOW! It comes with a program called Nevo, and while I've only used it a little (but I've gotten every device to work except my newer Hughes DVR), I think it's pretty awesome. It says something about having learning capability, and if that's the case, this thing is just bliss :). In addition, it appears that the Nevo settings are stored in the iPAQ storage area, and when I did a hard-reset to load my Ambicom wireless drivers, the settings were not erased! COOL!
07/24/2003 - Well, I've had my HP iPAQ h2210 for over a week now. It's good stuff! It's so incredible small! Even in it's case, it's very very small. But this thing sure can perform! It's very fast, and these benchmarks prove it!!! (www.PocketPCThoughts.com). The screen is great, too. And it's the same size as my old E-200's, but yet the device is smaller!!! The device has built-in bluetooth, but I don't have any bluetooth devices as of yet (would like to get a GPS and cell phone eventually). I've not been able to use my Symbol CF Wireless Networker with it (Symbol tech support says drivers won't be available until THE END OF 2003!!!), so I had to steal Nicki's Ambicom CF card, and it's worked fine for me. It seems Microsoft FINALLY got DHCP working pretty good. It worked in E-200, but most of the time I had to do a soft reset. So far, with PocketPC2003, I've had great luck with it. And it only takes a few seconds for it to get an address, too. This is great because in the past three years I've installed MANY wireless networks at different places, and it's great to be able to just get a new DHCP address. PocketPC 2003 has this thing called 'Zero-Config Wireless Networking'. Now, this is good for public (unencrypted) hostspots, but all of mine are using WEP, so there is a bit of config in there, but it wasn't bad at all. I did have to hard-reset the device to get the card to work initially, but that might of been because I had installed the drivers for my Symbol card (the PocketPC 2002 drivers) earlier, and it didn't work very well! But after the hard reset, I installed the Ambicom CF drivers, and when I put the Ambicom card in, the Windows wireless config thing came up and off I went. OK, what else... lots! The iPAQ Memory Store is pretty cool. I had this on my Casio E-200 as well, but didn't have a lot of luck with it (it worked, but caused my applications to behave strange sometimes). Now, Casio may have fixed the problem, but I stopped applying the Casio patches after I found their backup program WOULD NOT RESTORE A BACKUP if you updated your device! That was so horrible. In any case, on the same subject, it looks like the iPAQ comes with a backup rprogram, and I'm anxious to see if that works after updates are applied. Also updated in the new PocketPC2003 is Pocket Internet Explorer. In my limited testing I've found that PIE seems to be pretty snappy, and it renders mobile-based websites pretty quick! I've done some limited JavaScript testing and found that some things work, while others do not :(, so it STILL doesn't have even the more basic JavaScript support (unless I'm doing something wrong, which I might be). THIS THING FLIES WHEN PLAYING VIDEO FILES! I've tested both Windows Media Player 9 (what comes in ROM), and PocketTV (must download and install separately). Both are AWESOME. In PocketPC2002, some video files played horribly (like 2 frames per second). The same video files in WMP9 play damn near FLAWLESSLY at 30 frames per second (fps). WOW!!! And on the same subject, I think the speaker in this baby kicks ass. It's not as loud as my E-125, but it's about the same as the E-200. HOWEVER, it's got much better response (BASS) than my E-200 did! I'm QUITE happy with that. And, my case has speaker holes in that allow the sound to play even while the case cover is closed! AWESOME. So I can play sound, close the cover, and put it on my belt clip. It's GREAT! Gotta re-load my CF card with some updated MP3s! And, going back to the case... I just got my E&B Slipper Case for this baby. AWESOME. It's so thin! I still had to modify it (i.e. cut it) for my wireless card, but it still looks damned good. While I was at E&B, I also bought their car charger/USB Sync cable pack. Haven't used it yet, but I sure missed having being able to charge my E-200 in the car. And having a car charger might be very necessary! The iPAQ has a pretty small battery compared to my other units. But so far, it hasn't been a big problem, even with the wireless card... yet. The cool thing is the screen is so great, I usually have it set at one step above the LOWEST setting. Having that thing on BRIGHT is like shining a flashlight in your face! Awesome. But, one grip against the unit is that it only has a 10 minute backup battery. If your main battery drains, or you remove the main battery, it will ONLY LAST TEN MINUTES! That sucks! The E-125 and E-200 had separate coin cells for this purpose, and to my knowledge, they lasted for 24-48 hours (as I recall). Oh well, got the car charger :). And the display is perfectly readable outdoors! Good stuff. What else? Let's see... did I mention it was fast??? :) I put Teletype GPS (V1099), and it sure renders maps a lot quicker than my previous units! Awesome! Another gripe with the unit is that I don't think they have USB peripheral support :(. With my E-200 I had an adaptor and could use a USB keyboard, that was great when I was typing in lots of stuff. But, this may not be so bad as I'm sure there will be a microkeyboard out for this unit (if there isn't one already), or even a bluetooth keyboard maybe? That would be awesome. Going back to the wireless thing, I was transferring files between my server and this unit (via both FTP and SMB), and it was pretty quick too. On the E-200 it felt very slow, but now it's definately improved (the machine is fast enough to handle more). Also, I need to see if there is a serial cable to attach to my GPS (unless I wait for the bluetooth GPS units to come down in price). I love having that capability! But the wire tangle is HORRIBLE. I like that the port on the bottom of the iPAQ is so small. There is just a small hole in my case at the bottom for it, and with my new E&B USB sync cable, I can slap that in without taking the unit out of the case (like I could back with my E-125). Plus, the USB Sync cable can also charge the unit via USB! Cool! Well, I just started this page, so soon I hope to get some pictures posted, as well as information about software I use and whatnot. Expect more soon!!!
07/24/2003 - Started this page!