Long time readers of this magazine will remember the good old days when PDAs were PDAs, and mobile phones were mobile phones, and never the twain did meet. Depending on your perspective, maybe they weren’t all that good. You had to carry both a phone and a PDA with you. You had to download your e-mail to your device before you left the office, and then upload your replies when you got back. Browsing the Web with your PDA was just barely possible, with cabled connections to your phone or optional Wi-Fi adapters for hotspots that were few and far between.
Things are all “converged” and “connected” these days. Windows Mobile devices have plenty of functionality built into them, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, fast processors, plenty of memory and expansion slots, FM radio and GPS receivers, and last but not least, phones. We look at a number of phone-enabled devices in this issue, including the AT&T/Samsung BlackJack II, Moto Q Global, Verizon/Samsung i760, the Verizon SMT5800 and XV6800, the AT&T Tilt, and the new Asus 527. But we have a special treat for those who long for the good old days—we review HP’s new iPAQ 210, a Windows Mobile 6 Classic PDA. Note: It’s almost insulting to call this powerful device a PDA! Yes, it doesn’t have a phone. But it does have a brilliant four-inch VGA color touch screen, a 624 MHz processor, plenty of internal memory, two expansion card slots, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and more. Hal Goldstein has laid claim to the evaluation unit HP sent us—I may end up having to buy one for my personal use.
One of the things I liked most about the good old days of Windows Mobile was the ever-expanding variety of games available for these devices. Of course, most of them still work on the touch screen smartphones, and many of them have been ported over to the non-touch screen devices. In this issue, our new Games Editor, Eric Pankoke, reports on his top 10 games of all time, and the members of our Board of Expert Judges describe their all-time favorites.
Nathan Clevenger’s Enterprise section has a number of interesting articles covering developer’s tools, security applications, public sector deployments, and more. My favorite article was the one describing how a Pygmy tribe is using a GPS-enabled handheld to mark sacred places in their territory so that logging operations avoid them.
Also, check out Hal Goldstein’s Pocket View om page 88. Hal is grateful for the five gifts given to Windows Mobile by the Apple iPhone.
There’s much more content in this issue than I have room to describe, so check out the table of contents on the previous pages and thumb through the issue at your leisure. As always, feel free to e-mail us with comments, questions, and suggestions on how we can better serve you.
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