iPaq Headaches

Saturday, 16 September 2006 by marstinson.

Moved into the Big Leagues, sort of, with my recent graduation from a Palm Zire 31 to an iPaq Pocket PC. Just as an aside, the PPC seems to prove the corollaries to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that processor power doubles about every 18 months. Moore actually said that the number of transistors on a processor seems to be doubling about every 18 months (and it was only an observation, not a rule), but it has essentially the same effect. That  being the case and all other things remaining equal, the corollaries to Moore’s Law say that you should be able to buy the same product at half the price in eighteen months, the same product at half the size in eighteen months, or twice the product at the same price in eighteen months. So after unpacking it and checking out what was there, it seems that it packs about the same punch (with multiple times the memory) as the 386 machine that I had sitting on my desk about 10 or 12 years ago.

I purchased it as a factory refurbished unit on eBay and ended up with the same product and a 3-year warranty at $100 less (including shipping) than I would have paid at my local CompUSA. So, all in all, I’m thinking that I got a decent deal on it.

After unboxing it and doing and requisite amount of drooling and “wooooooo!” on my new purchase, I sat down to set it up. A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. First off, much to my dismay, it will only sync through its cradle, unlike my Zire, which sync’d through a standard USB. I got a little attachment that let me recharge it without the cradle, but nothing else as far as sync’ing. I found that to be a bit disheartening because it means carrying around more cables and junk, which is definitely not something that I need. The other thing that hit me was the almost complete lack of documentation. I’m not saying that I didn’t get manuals with it, because I did. But the manuals only dealt with the initial setup and hardware end of things; nothing on Windows Mobile or the applications that came preinstalled. If anyone else finds themselves in the same boat, Microsoft was kind enough to make their documentation available online.

To give HP and Microsoft credit where it’s due, the initial setup was a snap. I installed the battery and hooked it up to the charger (it came about 98% charged). After a little while, the charging light stopped flashing, so I dropped in the CD and installed the drivers and ActiveSync (I didn’t need any of the other bundled software), rebooted and plugged the cradle into a USB port. DIY-ers TAKE HEED: as a general rule for any HP product, install the drivers before you hook anything else up. Plug-n-Play detected the new device, installed the appropriate drivers and began to sync up immediately. No fuss, no muss, no bother. And on an even brighter note, unlike my Palm device, the iPaq will sync with multiple PCs. The only restriction is that you can only sync your Outlook email on one machine. No biggie (I’ll probably change my tune on that in a few weeks, but it’s no biggie today).

 The acid test (and the reason I went with an iPaq rather than with a fancier Palm) was sync’ing Windows Media Player. After all of the hassle that I’ve gone through over the past few weeks to whip my jams into some semblance of order, I decided that not listening to them would be a crime. So the prime requirements were that whatever device I ended up with had to be able to deal with Office files in their native formats, had to be able to sync with Windows Media Player and had to use SD cards for storage expansion. Just about everything else was negotiable. As it turned out, the iPaq met the requirements at a price that didn’t make me do much more than wince a bit.

The first order of business was going to be to set the thing up to use my home wireless network. This is where I first noticed the almost complete lack of decent documentation. Had I not known a bit about configuring wireless devices, I’d have been in a world of hurt as far as setting it up. And to make matters worse, finding my handheld’s MAC address was a good two-hour task. Most laptops have a nice little bar-coded sticker somewhere in or near the battery compartment that has the MAC address of the wireless card for that unit (PC cards have a sticker on the back of the card itself). But not the iPaq. No stickers and nothing in the documentation. And since I’m pretty clueless on Windows Mobile (this is my first device with that OS), I spent the better part of two hours tapping this, that and the other, hoping to kind of blindly stumble onto the information that I needed.

See, my home wireless network uses MAC address filtering as one of its security meausures. Not only to you have to know the SSID of the network (which is not broadcast) and have the proper key, the device’s MAC address also has to be on the “approved” list or it’s not connecting. Period.

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t getting anywhere and hopped online to HP’s technical support site, hoping to get a little joy from that end. Boy, was I sadly mistaken. After being told that someone would be with me in about 5 minutes (automatically generated chat message), I sat down to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait. After close to 30 minutes, I gave it up as a lost cause and went back to my “tap and hope” scheme. It eventually paid off and I found the MAC address, which just goes to show that even a blind hog finds the occasional acorn. With that in hand, I set up my access point and everything was off and running.

Web access was decently speedy, and all of the web pages that I went to loaded and worked relatively well. Except for Microsoft, the web designers didn’t take handheld displays into account, so everything was a bit cramped, but otherwise functional. I was not able to get into my Hotmail account initially, but was able to get in a day or so later. Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe there was a problem with rendering. Who knows? But it worked eventually, which was all I wanted in the first place.

Anyway, as I said earlier, the acid test was Windows Media Player. One of the first things that I tried to do was to sync my SD card with my laptop. It was pretty much a situation of drag the song that I wanted to the sync list (or right-click and tell it ”add to the sync list”) and then click “Start Sync”. Worked just fine except for one itty-bitty problem: it took two to three minutes to synchronize each song and wouldn’t do more than 15 or 20 songs at a time before generating errors. On a song-at-a-time basis this is probably not that big of a deal. But when you’re trying to fill a 1GB flash card, that’s a couple of days of waiting for the sync to finish. And that was also unacceptable.

So, my next idea was to try to use the SD card as a simple storage device. It sync’d up just fine with WMP and only took a second or two per song. But anything that was DRM-protected (which is most of my library on the laptop) refused to play on the hand-held. Anything that was non-DRM-protected (like my ripped CDs) played just fine. Hmmmm. There has to be a better way of doing things.

HP’s technical support was about useless on this issue. And while an answer to my questions about the time it takes to sync might eventually appear on the Microsoft Newsgroups, I’ve seen nothing in 24 hours. So it appears that if I want to synchronize my music on the iPaq, my only viable options are to make sure that everything gets converted into non-DRM-protected .mp3 files and then transfer those to the SD card by treating it as an extrnal storage device. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Beyond that issue, though, the iPaq is a neat little device. Again, I’m rather disappointed to find that it cannot be sync’d except through its cradle. But as another bright issue, battery power seems to be lasting a lot longer than my Palm. I went to do some shopping this morning, jamming the whole way. It took a couple of hours and had drained less than 10% of my battery. In comparison, a couple of hours of jams would have knocked about 50% of the battery off of my Palm.

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