iPaq - the continuing saga

Haven’t written anything in a while, so it’s probably time that I did something just to let folks know that I’m still alive and kicking.

The iPaq saga continues. Thus far I haven’t run into any major issues with the iPaq. I work with Excel files frequently and have run into a couple of annoyances, though. First off, whatever you do, do not transfer files to Windows Mobile until you have unfrozen the panes in any spreasheets you are sharing between desktop and handheld. The silly thing absolutely will not scroll past the freeze point on the handheld. Using the auto-filter feature isn’t quite as bad. On the handheld, it treats everything as hidden rows and columns. Unhiding isn’t that big of a task, but I cannot count the number of times that I have forgotten to unfreeze, sync’d with the handheld and then been unable to work with the sheet on the handheld. So it’s back to the laptop, unfreeze, resync and then I’m good to go.

Oh, yeah. Don’t be surprised when your fonts change. Excel’s default font is Arial, but that’s not what the Excel Mobile uses. Generally not an issue except in those cases where you have changed the background color of a cell. In that case, selecting all and changing the font will not change the font in the colored cells. You’ll have to do those one color at a time.

The handwriting recognition on the iPaq is no good in my book. Of course I’ve often been told that I should apply to a medical school to teach a handwriting course to aspiring doctors, too. So I use the on-screen keyboard a lot. Not a big deal since I’m a decent touch-typist in the first place and don’t have to hunt for keys. The only complaint I have in this department is that I keep missing the spacebar and closing the keyboard by mistake. The autocomplete feature (that’s where you type in the first few letters and it offers you a suggestion for the rest of the word) is sometimes helpful, often not.

Calendar, tasks and notes seem to sync up pretty well in Outlook. I definitely don’t like the fact that you can’t use the Outlook Journal on the handheld, though. I keep track of a lot of conversations, meetings, phone calls, letters, email and whatnot through the Journal on my laptop (very convenient). But there is no Journal feature on the handheld. Anything that I want to do in that department either has to be entered as a note or as an appointment. After I sync, I have to open up whatever I created on the handheld and then copy/paste it into a new Journal entry. Major pain in the patootie.

I had a serious issue with battery life for a while after starting to use the iPaq. Silly thing drained down to nothing in the course of a few hours to a day, so I was constantly having to plug it into the charger. A bit of digging around in HP’s support site and a couple of chats with the techs eventually got me to a firmware update that resolved that issue. My battery now lasts for the better part of a week. At the same time, I upgraded the ActiveSync software to the latest version (4.2 as of this writing) and haven’t had a lick of troube since.

One caution on upgrading the ActiveSync and firmware, though. Make sure that all of your synchronized files are current and backed up before you do any upgrade. Once you upgrade, your desktop will see your handheld as being a new device and it will no longer see your previous synchronization settings or files.

The WMP has been an absolute god-send from my perspective. Once I resolved the issue of synching the music files, I just plugged my speakers into the headphone jack and hit “Play”. Oh, yeah. We be jammin’.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 19 November 2006 at 17:49 and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.