Tuesday, May 23, 2006 6:29 PM
So I got this flippin' sweet new (old) PDA called the Viewsonic Viewpad 100 . 800x600 resolution (10" or so), resistive touch screen (any touch, no stylus needed), USB device support(!), CompactFlash, PC Card, infrared, and more. The device is really cool, and went for near $1000 when it came out ($100 for mine...). The problem is its software support. It only runs Windows CE 3.0. Of course no new software has come out for that in a few years. There are actually quite a few applications out there, but it isn't going to grow much anymore. This really bugs me. The CPU and memory match that of many low-end PDA's these days, yet it's relegated to old, unsupported applications only. Now think of modern PC hardware. I can run Windows XP on a 500MHz Pentium 3 with only 256MB of RAM, yet there is no way to install Windows Mobile 2003 (CE 4.2). Now you could argue that the processor is a barrier, yet it runs on the Intel StrongARM processor which has got to be at least partly compatible with the current Intel XScale. Remember older versions of Windows working on 386 or 486 hardware? Windows XP runs on Pentium 3, 4, and AMD processors. This smacks of vendor lock-in and nothing else. I don't believe that it is technologically impossible to run newer versions of CE on the unit. Essentially they are tying the OS to the hardware way too closely.
I've done some looking and haven't been able to find a decent hacker community for it. This is hard to believe. There are a number of Internet devices such as the old MSN Companion (HP iPAQ), WebTV, eVilla, and others with dedicated communities devoted to unlocking their full potential. There are so many cool applications out there, not to mention the .NET Framework, and being unable to install them is very frustrating.
If I could get things to work, I know that there would still be problems. Few applications are written specifically to CE, but rather to the Windows Mobile shell environment. Assumptions due to screen size, available hardware, and windowing would cause many apps to look weird or fail to run at all. I think that this is a problem in general, but nonetheless, it would be a barrier to running apps. Even if I could just get things to run in a small 240x320 corner of my full screen I'd still be happier! As it is, I'd like to say that I can write the apps that I want, but I'm not about to write eMbedded C or VB applications. I'm pretty entrenched in .NET at this point so it would be painful. On the other hand, amazingly the device comes with Jeode Java Virtual Machine (not sure what specific JVM spec) which runs at least 1.0 apps. Again, it would be nice to get up-to-date JVM support, but it's probably stuck where it is.
My last complaint is IE 4.0. Very nice having this version on there, but it doesn't do most modern DHTML/AJAX/CSS tricks. Worse still, it seems to identify itself simply as IE 4.0, so sites such as GMail send code that won't actually run. I see that Firefox has a PDA version, but it's not compiled for CE 3.0. Once again, I'm out of luck for now!
On the positive side (there definitely is one!), I'm wireless, and I can plug into a USB hub for a full-size keyboard and mouse -- not some custom input device designed for PDA's. I've successfully gotten a 512MB USB stick to work in it too (using a third-party Mass Storage Device driver). I have a nice file explorer and music player, and can even stream music from network shares (something my Dell Axim can
not do!). It's wealth of features just make it all the more painful that it is considered outdated.
Anyway, if anyone has more information on hacks, OS upgrades, or any neat tips or tricks (or just wants to chat about a cool PDA), let me know. I'm definitely interested!