What's on the <EM>Smartphone & Pocket PC</EM> blogs?

Table of ContentsAug/Sep 2006

Here are short summaries of just a few of the great posts published daily on the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine blogs. We encourage you to read the complete post, post your own comments, and ask questions of the authors. Below each post we've placed the date of the post and the name of the person who wrote it. To find and read the complete post, go to the blog home page (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/) and use the navigation calendar in the right column to browse to the date in question.

Review of PIEPlus 2.0: A great Internet Explorer plug-in

Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) was renamed Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM) with the release of Windows Mobile 5.0. Whatever you call it, it lacks many of the features of its desktop PC brother. This has spawned the introduction of alternate browsers for the Windows Mobile OS and a number of plug-ins that enhance the capabilities of PIE/IEM. A new version of one of these plug-ins has just been released: PIEPlus version 2.0 (http://www.reensoft.com/PIEPlus/). Many of the bugs and shortcomings of the previous version have been corrected, and the new version adds a number of important new features, including:

URL Alias and Service
Forward/back Menu
Reopen closed tabs

The program works with the mobile version of Internet Explorer found on Pocket PC 2002 through Windows Mobile 5.0. (A full review of the product is posted online.)

Posted 5/24/06 by Werner Ruotsalainen

PIEPlus 2.0 adds new features to Internet Explorer Mobile.

Geocaching Basics: Cache information in GPX Files

I'm starting a series of articles on Geocaching. For those unfamiliar with this sport, it's a high-tech scavenger hunt game which involves GPS receivers and hidden caches (containers with a log and possibly some items to trade). The Pocket PC is a great companion for this sport, but before getting into details of how to use the Pocket PC for geocaching, I'd like to cover some basics.

Caches are hidden all over the world. The cache owners place their coordinates (latitude and longitude), description and possibly some hints on the Geocaching.com Web site. The basic cache information is stored in a LOC file. This format provides only basic coordinate information. If you become a premium member of Geocaching.com you have access to GPX filesXML files containing detailed information about caches. (The rest of this article is online. Al will publish an article on the subject of Geocaching in the Oct/Nov 2006 issue.)