Note: A second installment is now available.
A few months back, I had this massive gadget craving. I spent some cash on CDs and a newer MiniDisc player to avoid it. Then it hit again, and I splurged on a two thousand dollar sound card (with six on-board DSPs).
Still, I was not sated...
So, today, I went out and bought a Compaq iPAQ and some expensive accessories.
1 Compaq iPAQ 3650
1 IBM 1G Microdrive kit with USB reader and PCMCIA/CF adapter card
1 Compaq iPAQ PCMCIA expansion pack/jacket
The synopsis of the out-of-the-box experience is that everything pretty much works after installing ActiveSync (MS' answer to Palm Desktop's HotSync and Install) and the drivers for the USB CF/SmartMedia reader that came with the Microdrive. I can plug the Microdrive in the PCMCIA adapter card, plug that into the PCMCIA expansion pack/jacket, and the iPAQ will recognize a storage card with a nice 1G of free space.
The next thing I wanted to get working was 802.11b. Compaq has a driver for their card, the W100, which I don't have. However, kicking around the office are 3Com AirConnect cards, one Cisco Aironet card, and, although they're hiding from me at the moment, a few Lucent Orinoco Wavelan cards.
So far, here's how I net out:
A few brief words about 802.11(b)...
In general, it rocks. At work, we have two major 802.11b installs -- two Apple AirPort base stations and two 3Com AirConnect base stations. But wait, isn't 802.11(b) standard?
It is, but apparently, and I haven't dug into this much, and I'm not sure I buy it, the cards and/or base stations each support the same protocol, but do initial setup or negotiation differently. What I do know is that in the old San Francisco office, where the only 802.11b support was using Apple's base stations, at least one of our people got Lucent Orinoco cards to work along just fine. So it may be 3Com cards, their base stations, or both.
Or not.
Bleh.
Anyway, the idea here is to get an 802.11 card working, and then futz with the Windows builds of libpcap and tcpdump to see if I can get them working with Windows CE.
One other annoying thing is that Windows Media Player won't easily let me look at the storage card for, well, anything. At all. Which is sort of annoying. I mean, I'm not very well going to put a bunch of MP3s on the 1G Microdrive just to copy them over and then delete them to and from main memory every time I want to listen to one. Lame. I suspect I'm expecting the user interface to act differently and be more Windows-like (I haven't found a way to delete files in the packaged version of Windows Explorer as of yet -- I grabbed a freeware app [dTree] to do this and to help out moving files around the file system).
I don't plan to migrate all my email from Microsoft Entourage on my Apple PowerBook to Outlook on my Win2K box just to sync with this. Entourage works. Outlook doesn't. Note that Entourage was written by the same guy who wrote the excellent Claris Emailer (for the Mac people lurking out there). Entourage allows me to drag and drop whole folders of mail to my desktop in Mac OS as standard mbox spools. Outlook, well, has an ironic lack of foresight.
So, if I don't plan to be productive in a salaryman like way with the iPAQ (a task which I'll leave to my Visor Platinum), I'm resigned to hacking around with it. So far, I'm not all that peeved, and I'm impressed by the iPAQ itself, though I find the installed software a little lacking. But again, that's because I'm not using almost half the built-in utils to actualize robust business solutions. A rather loose but enthusiastic perusal of iPAQ software sites on the Web leaves me (tonight, anyway) with a few new useful tools installed, including Pocket Scheme.
I haven't yet messed around with my 33.6 cellular capable PCMCIA XJACK modem with the iPAQ.
I managed to swap out the Microdrive for the 64 M CF card that I use in my Canon Digital Elph camera and found all the files on it in dTree as JPEGs (which they are). But again, Picture Viewer won't let me browse the storage card. Why not? Copying is dumb. But if I do copy, I can view and scroll around the 1200 x 1600 images (for as many as I copy, of course).
I don't feel I'm like I'm missing out on anything. I sort of had that feeling when I bought my Visor over the TRGPro (a modified Palm III with CF expansion slot, instead of the Visor's proprietary Springboard). But then Handspring (and third parties) came through with a critical mass of Springboard modules and I ceased to care. With the iPAQ, I get any benefits of CF, plus the ability to use all the PCMCIA cards I can find drivers for.
I suppose that if I become really masochistic and self-loathing over the next few weeks, of if I find myself relegating the iPAQ to a paperweight in a month or so, I'll put on my black leather and gag ball and install PocketLinux on it. Might be interesting in the networking side of things, anyway. I'd wager getting ethereal and libpcap to build on Linux will be simpler-harder than tweaking libpcap and tcpdump Windows desktop builds to work on WinCE (harder-simpler). But who knows.
The killer app of the iPAQ, in my mind, is Bluetooth. Too bad we're currently in that dumb phase of vendor in-operability. Oh wait, we have it in 802.11 too. But 802.11 works, even if only a little and Not As Advertised (or perhaps Batteries Not Included).
I'm somewhat pleased to see Compaq hacking their own shite. Mostly I've seen Compaq techs getting Linux and X Windows working, but there's also some interesting vapourware design sketches of more interesting expansion packs/jackets including wireless networking and mid-to-low res cameras.
Ask me how I'm doing in a week. If people find stuff of interest, please mail
it my way.
--
Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]