Friday
Jan262007
Windows Mobile 5..... aaaaargh
Friday, January 26, 2007 at 17:10
Last year, I bought a HP iPaq hx2790. Partly because I'd been without a PDA for a couple of years, but mostly because I don't want to boot up my laptop to see my mail or calendar.
The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;
As long as I stick to this everything works just fine.
This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable.
During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults.....
One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5.
No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.
The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;
- Wireless broke down after a couple of weeks (also see an old post on my old blog). The first time they fixed it... they didn't fix it at all. So it had to go back for repairs again.
- On the weirdest occasions all my synced e-mail bodies were complete gibberish or they were just empty. The only way to solve this was break the pairing with ActiveSync remove everything from the PDA, and sync it again.
[SOLUTION: disable the HP Encryption Tools crap] - 9 out of 10 times I had to reset the device when I powered it on. So most of the times it would be more time efficient to boot up my laptop.
[SOLUTION: don't use the HP Encryption tools for securing your device. Just use the simple standard PIN code for logging on to the PDA] - Applications would crash easily. Result: more resets.
[SOLUTIONS: do not install third-party software]
As long as I stick to this everything works just fine.
This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable.
During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults.....
One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5.
No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.
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