Monday, September 26, 2005

Tweaks2K2 for PPC Finalist!

For the Second Time this year the Board of Experts of SmartPhone & Pocket PC Magazine has voted Tweaks2K2 .NET for Pocket PC to be among the best in its category "System and Registry" in Pocket PC magazine's Fifth Annual Best Software Awards.

Monday, September 19, 2005

WM5 will give you at least 25% of battery life.

WM5 will give you at least 25% more battery life.

According to Mike Calligaro, member of Microsoft Mobile Team, the fact that Windows Mobile 5 use Persistent Storage to keep the data safe in your Pocket PC will give you from 25% to 50% more of battery live.

“when we shut you down because your batteries were "critically low," they were still 1/4 to 1/2 full.  Why?  Because, if the batteries ever fully died, it would be catastrophic.  You'd lose your data, and that's, in our opinion, one of the worst things that can happen.  So we made a requirement and held our OEMs to it.  The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were "critically low," they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours.  The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you'd still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger.” – Mike Calligaro says.

“A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge.  128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours.  64M takes about 250.  This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device.  It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.” – He added.

So taking in consideration the above explained, we could see from 25% to 50% more of battery life depending of your current amount of RAM.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

My Docware Pictures

Here are my Docware Pictures from my hx4700.

Monday, September 05, 2005

5000 mAh in your hx4700!

Mugen Power has made a new Extra Extended Battery reaching 5000 mAh. The new battery can be bought here.    

Sunday, September 04, 2005

ROM update problems??

If you are having problems with your ROM update this thread at BrightHand.com is something that you should read before you send your hx4700 back to HP to be fixed.

Mugen Power 4500 mAh BATTERY

"This is the second Mugen Power Battery that I own and I can't think of me having a Pocket PC without a Mugen Power Battery on it. This battery gives me the freedom of mind of not having to think about to recharge the battery everyday after work. "

Read the full review here.

You can buy this battery here.    

Recommended Accessories

hx4700 Cases

Screen Protectors
                        
Stylus
                        
GPS
    

Recommended Software for hx4700


Screen Capture
  
Today Screen Lauchers

Task Managers

Today Screen Themes

Remote Control Software  (no hardware needed at all but the IR port is located at the bottom of your hx4700 so you may need a program like RotateSE180)

Scientific Calculator


Tools

Note: None of the OC tools tested by me so far are completely stable in the hx4700. Some times they work for many days without any problem and they suddenly they lock the device in a way that a hard reset is needed to get control of it again. This is my personal experience and could differ from the experiences of others. Please create a daily backup before you use any OC.                            
        
Other Programs
    

Advice to New hx4700 Owners

This is something that I believe all new owners should read before they start to install programs in any Pocket PC.



My advice to new Owner

Invisible tool bar icons in SE

For Developers: Code Solution for Invisible tool bar icons in SE and ImageList initialization error in hx4700s.


Many of my fellow developers have been looking for a solution for the first and lately for the second issue. Both issues in some way are relative and are clearly a bug in Microsoft Compact Framework. Doing some research in the web looking for different ways to initialize an ImageList object during the form load time I found a way that fix the SE icons invisibility issue and the initialization error present in hx4700 when the BitMap Cache parameter of the ATI driver is enabled. So basically, there is not need to disable the bitmap cache to avoid the error in hx4700s if you use this method to initialize the ImageList component.



To easily understand the process I have prepared a C# and VB .NET projects that can be downloaded here.

Note: This problem was fixed in the latest ROM update for this device.