Adventures in PocketPC Wireless Computing
I got my hands the other day on a wireless PCMCIA card so I decided to see if I could it working on a old Pocket PC I have. Now I must admit that I do not always use my Pocket PC. I started using it quite a bit and even bought the extra jacket so that I could slot in PCMCIA cards. Initially I even use to dial in from home to work to sync my email.Our dial-in infrastructure though moved to a more secure smart card based infrastructure and that was that. Subsequent to that I have used the PPC on an on and off basis but getting the wireless card certainly got me started again.
I have a Pocket PC 2002 device so this make things a bit more interesting. Some manufacturers do provide a service to upgrade these devices to 2003 and this would be really useful as wireless is built in and Windows Media Player 9 is there too. I needed to go through some extra hoops
1) Inserted the card: Nothing. Using XP etc you get kinda use to the card being recognised and just moving on. No luck here. So had to go the manual route of finding drivers. I found this without too many issues on the HP/Compaq site and within a few minutes I had this downloaded and installed it.
2) Configuring the card: This is where having the functionality built into the OS is really useful!!. In this case I had to use a tool that came with the card to configure the wireless connectivity. They have support for different profiles (at home, at work etc). I followed the instruction from the MS intranet site to get onto the wireless network but no luck (our wireless net depends on certs). Tried at home (where I have a WEP enabled wireless network) and after initially struggling I found out that a soft reset does the job. So I am online from PPC at home.
The browsing experience:
I tried to browse some of my usual sites and unfortunately the experience is not that great. Many sites do not render well on the PPC and the browser is slow at rendering too (again one of those things PPC 03 caters for). I went to the MS Pocket PC site and found some links to sites that do Pocket PC based rendering (eg the BBC). The experience becomes a lot lot better. Overall though there does seem to be a lack of sites that support the Pocket PC. I found that I could get online to my Microsoft email though OMA (equivalent to OWA but for mobile devices) and this was pleasant too. With many of these devices now shipping standard with wireless cards I would hope that many sites would start offer optimised for devices versions (they can start to use ASP.NET Mobile Controls :-))
I had similar issues with Windows Media and in fact the device hung a couple of times. I tried to see if I could 702 on my device but no luck. I did get Classic FM from the UK to work so I know audio streaming is possible.