I decided to check up on the PocketPC scene for my XDAIIs sake… it’s been lonely.
After a bunch of hours editing files left and right… actually the whole of last night to be precise. And after the whole of this morning of multiple hard resets and some other pitfalls, I’ve finally installed the much awaited second edition of the Windows Mobile operating system for PocketPCs.
In the PPC scene, this has been a much awaited upgrade since a considerable amount of new features and improvements have been incorporated into the new OS. Improvements such as better battery life, landscape mode, a better radio ROM, better cleartype, etc. etc.
For those who didn’t understand that previous paragraph, you don’t have to – Let’s just say it’s a huge update.
Anyways, to shed some light to those who can’t relate, I’d probably be explaining one of the more important features… well at least the features that we’re important to me.
First was the landscape mode. PDAs nowadays are rectangular and are vertically oriented (portrait mode), there are a bunch of hacks out there that enabled landscape mode, but the good thing about the update is that landscape is now native to the OS. Having anything natively roughly translates to the fastest way of performing a task.
Landscape has been a big issue for most PocketPC users because one of the most common tasks done on a PDA is reading. And if you have fewer words per line obviously means you’d have to scroll all the time. Add the fact that the fonts are big-ish, then you can imagine how much more of a hassle that becomes.
So that has been solved, plus even the global font sizing could now be adjusted. Yay!
A PocketPC Phone has 3 ROMs, a radio ROM (which governs the phone functions), the OS proper, and an extended ROM – which may or may not contained extra configuration options and apps. The extended ROM is where you have your operator-specific settings, and this is hackable (and which took me all of last night to setup).
Anyways, the extender ROM I got had an app called IntelliPad, which finally brings T9 input! T9 is actually predictive text input, but is usually attributed to to having the alphabet spread over the letters of a traditional digital keypad.
Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Here’s a picture:
*Yeah, all the **older** phones have it*
As the caption says, its basically what the rest of the “normal” phones have, and here we have a really high-tech gadget, which lacks the simplest input method for one handed operation.
But now that it has the feature, I’m not complaining 😉
I have yet to check the battery life (and the others), but all in all those two features alone were worth it.