Dell Axims and Powerbooks do mix

This probably makes me some kind of a pervert in Mac circles, but I’ve just bought a Dell Axim Pocket PC. It’s now incongrously sitting in its chrome-effect cradle next to my aluminium PowerBook, the shame of it all.

There’s actually a good reason for getting an Axim rather than a Palm - which seems to be the ‘approved’ PDA of choice for the Apple cogniscenti - which is that one of the projects I’m working on at the moment involves RSS feeds to handheld devices, and the corporate standard is Pocket PC. But it was actually something of a suprise, and it’s made me realise just how far the PDA market has come since I last bought one (which was sometime in 1999, unless you count a P800 last year).

The device itself is reasonably-well screwed together - it hasn’t quite got the same degree of brick-shithouseness that the Palms have, but that’s offset by the fact that it’s a) small, and b) got an extremely bright screen. The killer app as far as I was concerned was the wifi capability - Bluetooth is pretty much standard on PDAs now, but there still seems to something of a premium as far as wifi is concerned. The high-end Palms don’t do onboard wifi, nor will they run Pocket Skype. Put that together with PocketFeed (how could you not use software written by The Furrygoat Experience?), and it’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for, development-platform-wise.

Learning points from today are:

1) when banging head against firm surface because said PDA’s wifi connection isn’t working, remembering that you’ve enabled MAC address filtering on your base station will save hours of fun and amusement;

2) The MAC address that the Dell wireless utility reports is bollocks, so vx-IPconfig is the utility du jour once you’ve remembered about the MAC address filtering;

3) Dell’s documentation hasn’t improved any since I last bought any Dell kit;

4) Missing Sync works a treat syncing between the Axim and iCal etc etc.

Filed under Geek |