buying a pocket pc when....

[pocketNEWB]

[SiGen]

[damian]

[pocketNEWB]

Thanks all for your help... I will order the dell axim tomorrow. Thanks for the quick response too. Did annyone here have a dell axim? How do they like it? What have I been hearing about a free shipping offer? Im new at this can soemone explain me things about ppc what software is cumpolsory thatt I MUST BUY. WHatever you say goes, u tell me to buy some software i'll buy it. Thanks Please comment

[damian]

Well, I plan on ordering the Axim too.

There really is no "compulsory" PPC software. (cue-in for Dan East to mention Dex-plor ) It all depends on what you want to do with your PPC.

[pocketNEWB]

I probably want to use word, excel, take notes record, movies and games to pass the time by...

[pocketNEWb]

sorry, and when I was looking at a gaming site it said that it the game works on the following devices ipaq, em 500 etc... does it still work on the dell.... How is the dell axim for gaming

[damian]

Dell's pretty fast, so it should work. AFAIK it's actually faster than an ARM; it's definitely faster than an EM-500.

I'm not sure about the controls, though. I have yet to see a good review of the Dell.

Word, Excel, notes are already included.

As for games, I'm not too much of an expert, but other people here are.

[James S]

All games that are for the iPaq or that run on StrongARM PocketPC's will work on the Axim.

Two years ago there were three different types of incompatible CPUs in a few models of PocketPCs.
One of them was the SH3 processor, used HP's Jornada 52x and 54x series.
Second was the MIPS processor, used by Casio for their EM-500 and E-1xx series PocketPCs.
Third was StrongARM in Compaq iPaq PocketPCs.

StrongARM proved to be the fastest and provided the most battery life, so Microsoft standardized the industry by only supporting Intel's StrongARM CPUs.
The next generation of PocketPC's all used StrongARM, These included HP's Jornada 56x, iPaqs, and Casio's E-200, among other lesser known brands such as Audiovox Maestro and Toshiba e310.

In the last generation, a new form of ARM CPU was released by Intel, code named "XScale" because it had the ability to dynamically lower it's clock speed in order to save battery life. From this point on all PocketPC's utilized the "XScale" form of the ARM CPU.

All software that says it supports PocketPC ARM or iPaq(in the days of multiple CPUs) or PocketPC 2002 (the days after Microsoft quit supporting all but ARM) then it will work on your PocketPC, no matter what make or model (except for a few cases in which this is not the case. Such as hardware flaws involving the display of graphics or memory buffers.)

But there you go. A brief history of PocketPC CPUs.