Pocket PC 2003

This past weekend I finally received the Windows Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for my Dell Axim. It was somewhat painful to perform the upgrade. First of all, the backup format was changed between PPC2002 and PPC2003 so you could not simply use the backup utility to retain all the information, so all the data had to be manually backed up. Then it was a little flakey during the install. It lost the connection with the computer once and had to be restarted, which made me rather nervous since this can cause the flash ROM to be half-burned rendering the device unusable... fortunately it only died during the copying of the new image to the device before it actually started the burn process. After about 20 minutes, it finally completed the upgrade.

The first thing you'll notice is there is very little visibly changed. It does have a little better connectivity management but what I'm really looking for is a utility that will automatically recognize and log-on to all the various WiFi networks I use.

<rant state="on">Right now I have to keep a set of registry files and a registry editor on the device. I place these files in a folder off the Start menu and then when I "lanch" the reg file, it launches the registry editor and imports the file. This was tedious to setup since I had to manually enter the WiFi settings in the card setup utility, open the registry editor and save the keys. This had to be done for each WiFi network which I use. Windows already has the support for this roaming capability for notebooks so you'd think that a mobile Pocket PC would do the same. Seems more likely that you'd carry around the Pocket PC to more WiFi networks than even a notebook. </rant state="off">