Liberate your PDA

Last week I was lucky enough to be one thirty people chosen from my Information Systems class to get to trial an iPAQ pocket PC for the semester as part of a collaborative study between HP and the University into the use of portable computing in the tertiary setting (http://www.team.ac.nz/).
Aparently it’s supposed to help me in class etc., but a little exploring around the net to see what else could be done with the fancy little gadget, dredged up some ‘extra curricular’ uses to make the device a whole lot more exciting. It is astounding how many software applications are out there, and as many in the class may be looking to purchase or have one of these devices, a small rundown (and by no means extensive) on the best uses and applications I found for it in the last few days, would come in very useful as well as giving a deeper understanding to all of this aspect of ‘Technoculture’.

Websites
An excellent place for up to date info on everything in the Pocket PC/PDA world is a blog by Dale Coffing (http://www.pocketpcpassion.com/). Here he details information on the latest advancements and developments in this area. It’s also worth a look just to see some of the amazing things he’s been able to do with his Pocket PC.

Podcasts
Adam talked about podcasting in the last lecture, to those who are not aquatinted to podcasts there’s a good beginners guide at (http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2005/podcast.mspx). For pocket PC users I found the best RSS reader was Feeder Reader(http://www.feederreader.com/) and a quick visit to PocketCasting.com (http://directory.pocketcasting.com/index.php) gives an extensive list of podcasts of which Dave’s PDA place is very useful for picking up the latest on PDAs/Pocket PCs.

Playing DVDs on your pocket PC
Obviously Pocket PC’s don’t have a DVD drive, but with a few simple software downloads anyone can be watching movies on their Pocket PC. The crucial program to for this is DVD to Pocket PC (http://tom.file8.com/download/dvd_software/pocket_dvd.exe). This program takes a DVD and squeezes it into about 128MB easily fitting it on a typical memory card. From there it’s as simple as loading it onto the Pocket PC/PDA and playing it with a media player. I used pocketTV to do this (http://www.pockettv.com/#download) and was quite amazed at how a copy of the Matrix Revolutions came out in wide screen as well as very high and clear resolution.

Gaming
The pocketPC mag website (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/_enc/cat.asp?cat=2&name=Software) has an extensive list of games that can be downloaded for pocket PCs/PDAs. I managed to download a copy of Age of Empires, which only took up 20MB of memory on the device and was basically exactly the same(and as good) as playing it on a PC but of course portable.

TV Remote
Very useful when the annoying situation of loosing your TV Remote arises- Pocket PC TV remote controller (http://www.pdawin.com/TVremote.exe) is a marvelous little software program that uses the infrared port on any Pocket PC to make it into a remote control for most televisions!

I feel that in a way that I liberated my iPAQ from a life of monotonous and boring use, and am sure this brief collection of links could easily work the wonders same for yours, do check them out.


Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan