Opinions On Daily Use Of Pdaxrom

[ZDevil]

The mentioned applications are much more powerful than most of the programs available for Cacko/Sharp ROM.

I wonder how they compare to the Pocket "Office" apps you get with wince machines
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To me, the name Pocket "Office" in those wince machines is rather deceptive.
The so-called Pocket Word is actually nothing more than a simple WordPad with very limited formatting support.  AbiWord on pdaX is definitely the winner here. Even on Sharp/Cacko Hancom Word is said to be closer to M$ Word than Pocket Word.
Pocket Excel doesn't seem to be more useful than HancomSheet on Sharp/Cacko, and definitely not as powerful as gnumeric on pdaX.
For Powerpoint, Hancom Presenter on Sharp/Cacko seems to fall short; OOo should do the same job, and even better.
Very oftern I hear reviews and hypes on big commercial websites talking people in buying wince/ppc devices to take advantage of the mobile "Office", but there are always complaints from (new) buyers about the overstated functionality of such dwarfed Office suite.
Just my 0.2 cent.  

[daniel3000]

I really don't understand why Microsoft doesn't put more power into their mobile software. It cannot be so hard. Softmaker also does it, many private progammers also do it (see opensource solutions).

daniel

[adf]

I think the MS stuff is weak because it is more about sales than quality.  Think about how many of their apps are intentionally crippled to create additional markts and a need for additional licences and dev kits with licences...etc...


The 2003 1st ed on the voq is less powerful than sharprom out of the box on a 5x00.... but it is sufficient for simple pim/contact/email and basic (pocket ie) web browsing/ all tolerably integrated.  I'm very much looking forward to getting it to work as a modem for the Z

[desertrat]

To me, the name Pocket "Office" in those wince machines is rather deceptive.

Exactly

Very oftern I hear reviews and hypes on big commercial websites talking people in buying wince/ppc devices to take advantage of the mobile "Office", but there are always complaints from (new) buyers about the overstated functionality of such dwarfed Office suite.

The fact that desktop produced documents do not survive a round trip to the wince machine and back utterly cripples any usefulness[1]. That means Pocket "Word" is no good for anything other than simple note taking, or as a basic viewer for Word documents produced on the desktop. Pocket "Excel" is slightly in that you can actually use it standalone to produce credible spreadsheets, but it doesn't do charts! Their website says "When, where and how you work is entirely up to you with wince", yeah my a$$  It's true you can take your work with you, but don't expect to be able to do anything with it and have it transferred back to your desktop verbatim.

[1]WM2005 is slightly better in this respect as it preserves more of a document's contents when converting to wince. But for me, any loss of content or information is unacceptable.

[adf]

I supposed I should have mentioned that I just started with wince 03 last week---
I expected it to be kinda crppled, but was stll pretty shocked at how limited ALL the apps seem to be.  Obvious options are missing in almost every menu, every app has some obvious feature left ou, or stripped. The coming from any Z rom to wince seems like a really, unpleasantly eye opening xperience.

of course, the fewe things that wince does rerwquire very little configuration or tinkering.  not a great tradeoff, imho.  But as I said- if you don7 expect much from it, it Can do simple tasks ok.  

I haven't tried / or inended to try any office stuff.  I would have guessed, though that some major core functionality would be simply missing.

[uMP2k]

I supposed I should have mentioned that I just started with wince 03 last week---
I expected it to be kinda crppled, but was stll pretty shocked at how limited ALL the apps seem to be.  Obvious options are missing in almost every menu, every app has some obvious feature left ou, or stripped. The coming from any Z rom to wince seems like a really, unpleasantly eye opening xperience.

of course, the fewe things that wince does rerwquire very little configuration or tinkering.  not a great tradeoff, imho.  But as I said- if you don7 expect much from it, it Can do simple tasks ok. 

I haven't tried / or inended to try any office stuff.  I would have guessed, though that some major core functionality would be simply missing.
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One thing that should be noted is that the VOQ runs a fairly old version of the windows mobile for smartphone software rather than the more powerful Windows mobile for Pocket PC OS.  Atlhough the latest release of Windows Mobile (WM5) does bring those two operating systems much closer together there are still some difference.

That said, it is true that Pocket Office (or Office Mobile as it is now called) is fairly limited.  The new version of Mobile Word pretty much solves the roundtripping issues, but only in the sense that it does not strip out the incompatible features when you open a document on the Pocket PC.  Instead it ignores them, leaving them untouched for when you open the document on a full desktop version of word.  In terms of features it is still probably a bit less capable than Hancom Word and way way way behind AbiWord.  

There is TextMaker available for the PocketPc, which is probably about the same as AbiWord in terms of features.  

The biggest problem with using mobile office (and a lot of other software) on the Pocket PC is the the screen resolution, however.  Even on my Dell Axim x50v, which has a 3.7 inch (diag) 640 x 480 screen (pretty much the same specs as on my new C1000) the OS only allows you to see most things in a sort of simulated qVGA resolution, so you see much less on the screen which is a real pain when trying to do word processing.  Despite all the many great strengths of the PocketPC (particularly a device like the x50v/x51v) like built in wifi/BT, great HWR and a lot of very very useful apps it is the screen real estate issue which is the one thing that has made me look to the Z as my pocketable desktop replacement.

[adf]

.... and not having to buy software that turns out not to work as advertised?  the stuff for '03 ist on the voq is pretty weak multimedia web streams..surprisingly so, in fact.

I do realize the stuff on Voq is a little old.  so is shaprom, for that matter.  The voq was cheap

Back to the topic.  been back on Beta3for a few days. It is really nice. this time around I did the default desktop + rox, installed practically everyithing from the contrib feeds and the mains and beta1 (like 2+ gigs o software)  It all seems to work beautifiully. No probs with the 4 gig sd.

I do have an mplayer question, though..
 on both pre 7 and pre 8 (the feed's and meanie's respectivey) vga video playback is slower than I'd like...slower than cacko.  when I try mplayer -nocache -framedrop -vo bvdd filename, it crashes telling me it can't open bvdd.
suggestions?

[Meanie]

.... and not having to buy software that turns out not to work as advertised?  the stuff for '03 ist on the voq is pretty weak multimedia web streams..surprisingly so, in fact.

I do realize the stuff on Voq is a little old.  so is shaprom, for that matter.  The voq was cheap

Back to the topic.  been back on Beta3for a few days. It is really nice. this time around I did the default desktop + rox, installed practically everyithing from the contrib feeds and the mains and beta1 (like 2+ gigs o software)  It all seems to work beautifiully. No probs with the 4 gig sd.

I do have an mplayer question, though..
 on both pre 7 and pre 8 (the feed's and meanie's respectivey) vga video playback is slower than I'd like...slower than cacko.  when I try mplayer -nocache -framedrop -vo bvdd filename, it crashes telling me it can't open bvdd.
suggestions?
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well, cacko's mplayer is in fact ATTY's mplayer which was compiled with bvdd support and iwxmmt optimisations.
i just realised that I only compiled it with xscale but not iwxmmt optimisation hence, the huge performance difference.
also, i did not include bvdd because that would require some code changes, mainly changing the fbcon code to use the bvdd driver instead. i wanted gmplayer support which requires gtk support rather than fbcon/bvdd.

[dlj0]

The mentioned applications are much more powerful than most of the programs available for Cacko/Sharp ROM.

I wonder how they compare to the Pocket "Office" apps you get with wince machines
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Well, both abiword and gnumeric on pdaXrom are exactly the same as on my debian desktop.  The "pocket" versions of word and excel are scaled-down, limited-utility things for over-stressed CE machines, these are not.  From what I saw back when I used Sharp roms, these are also much more robust than the Hancom equivalents (though I don't know about the Powerpoint clone -- OTOH, I hate powerpoint, and don't use anything like it.  Most of my lectures use one rock scratching on another.

[adf]

.... and not having to buy software that turns out not to work as advertised?  the stuff for '03 ist on the voq is pretty weak multimedia web streams..surprisingly so, in fact.

I do realize the stuff on Voq is a little old.  so is shaprom, for that matter.  The voq was cheap

Back to the topic.  been back on Beta3for a few days. It is really nice. this time around I did the default desktop + rox, installed practically everyithing from the contrib feeds and the mains and beta1 (like 2+ gigs o software)  It all seems to work beautifiully. No probs with the 4 gig sd.

I do have an mplayer question, though..
 on both pre 7 and pre 8 (the feed's and meanie's respectivey) vga video playback is slower than I'd like...slower than cacko.  when I try mplayer -nocache -framedrop -vo bvdd filename, it crashes telling me it can't open bvdd.
suggestions?
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right.  the gtk support is worthwhile, imho... besides I usually do qvga vid on my Z anyway

well, cacko's mplayer is in fact ATTY's mplayer which was compiled with bvdd support and iwxmmt optimisations.
i just realised that I only compiled it with xscale but not iwxmmt optimisation hence, the huge performance difference.
also, i did not include bvdd because that would require some code changes, mainly changing the fbcon code to use the bvdd driver instead. i wanted gmplayer support which requires gtk support rather than fbcon/bvdd.
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