last update
February 14, 2005

The digital creation

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"Ideas from creativity, technical skills from experience and hard work from passion: these are the three key components required to make high quality entertainment software. But... "and the money?" someone could ask. Well, the money is the invisible glue keeping together that C-like expression and it only comes from satisfied customers.
That's how things work in this crazy, yet so fascinating, little wired world!"

 
My Pocket PCs

Welcome to the one of the most visited pages of the website!
Below you can find a series of brief comments about the Pocket PC devices I own and, naturally, since "Hardware is nothing without software", a list of my favorite applications for the Pocket PC, which may help anyone who feels a bit lost in the ocean of software available for this platform, most of which not worth even a single cent of your wallet.

My Pocket PCs

Dell Axim X3

Purchased at the beginning of December 2003 on the italian Dell online store this Pocket PC has been in my... well... pocket until now. Considering its good price/performance ratio I can say I've been very satisfied with it until now since I used it for just everything, from development to playing games, reading documents, taking notes and generally impressing friends with what a modern Pocket PC can do.
However as my mobile needs are becoming more demanding I'm finding its 32Mb of RAM and the lack of Wi-fi or Bluetooth connectivity a pretty limiting factor, so I'm going to replace it as soon as the first wave of VGA device will hit the market during the last quarter of 2004.
Dell is doing a very good job on the Axim line and I really look forward to their incoming VGA capable Pocket PCs. I only hope they start placing the speaker on the front and not on the back of the PDA, since I really hate that placement!
Ipaq 3130

During April 2003, when I was busy in the development of my wargame project Strike or Die, I figured I needed a way to increase my personal productivity and, in order to be able to read eBooks and documents away from my desktop PC, in front of which I already spend a lot of hours, I purchased an used Ipaq 3130 from an Italian eBay user.
It didn't take too long to figure out that these devices are much more than PIMs (Personal Information Managers), but more appropriately "Pocket PCs".
Then, thanks to the experience I accumulated working on Strike or Die, the step to start developing quality entertainment software for this platform has been even shorter.
Although the monochrome display of my Ipaq prevented me from trying out some nice games I was interested in, it soon became an invaluable tool not only to read e-mail, ebooks and documents everywhere I went, but also as a nice alarm-clock and even as a little flashlight!
Oh, and even to manage my Euro coins collection with Ecpc, of course.



Recommended Pocket PC software

RepliGo 2.0 Commercial

I found RepliGo when I was searching for a more efficient way to be able to read PDF documents on my Pocket PC, instead of using the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free but too much resource hungry for my tastes.
I was impressed by its conversion and compression capabilities, not only for PDF files but also for many other types of documents.
The viewer is available for free, while the conversion tool, which runs on the desktop PC, can be purchased for $24.95 or $29.95 depending on the platform.
A must have if you, like me, have the need to read your documents everywhere, but far away from your desktop PC.
If you've found this comment useful and you're going to purchase RepliGo, you can do that from this affiliate link on PocketGear.
And if your company have the need to mobilize a lot of PDF documents Cerience has recently released a pretty powerful tool: RepliGo PDF Mobilizer.

Spb Time Commercial

Discovered almost by chance, Spb Time has become that kind of utility which quietly resides on your Pocket PC and you immediately miss it if you forget to reinstall it just after a hard reset or a memory card format. As you can read on this review on PPCThoughts it's a great looking original software sporting a nice number of time-related features, my favorites being the multiple timers and stopwatches and the screensaver mode showing the digital or analog clock with calendar using the skin of my choice.
Another piece of nice software from Spb Software House!
If you've found this comment useful and you're going to purchase Spb Time, you can do that from this affiliate link on PocketGear.

Total Commander Pocket Freeware

Since I already use the excellent file manager utility Total Commander on my desktop PC, you can't imagine my happiness when I discovered that its author Christian Ghisler released a Pocket PC version of it!
Funnily enough back in the old says the application name was Windows Commander, but the author had to change it when attorneys representing the owner of the trademark Windows "recommended" him to do so.
The Pocket PC version is currently Freeware, so you don't have any excuse for not trying it out.

Microsoft eBook Reader Freeware

I love to read eBooks on my Pocket PC, in particular about military history, so although a bit slow and memory hungry, I can't but recommend you to install the latest version of the Microsoft Reader.

PHM Power Toys Freeware

Philippe Majerus, a Microsoft MVP, has released a series of little tools for the Pocket PC and assembled them in a Power Toys package, which you can download for free. I found very useful in particular the Alt-F4 and the Alt-Tab Power Toy shortcuts assignable to the Pocket PC buttons and also the Unicode Notepad.
Be sure to check out also his other Pocket PC utilities available from his personal page here.
Warring States Freeware

There aren't many turn based strategy wargames for the Pocket PC at the moment, so I was pleased to discover this little but fun Freeware wargame made by Max Tillberg and set in the Warring States period in China (464-222 BC), a game which also runs on monochrome displays.
Simple but addictive, as a light wargame should be, don't miss it!
...

More recommended software to come!

} //Always close your opened parenthesis both in the code and in real life ;-)