Gupta's Greats

We've all heard the words, "coming to a theater near you," but how about, "coming to a Pocket PC near you"? Thanks to Pocket PC Films, you can now watch full-length movies on your Pocket PC using the built-in Windows Media Player.

You can't watch movies on the new Fonix PDA PC watch, but you can beam your Pocket PC's appointments, tasks, contacts, and notes to it.

Want to create a well-organized list of all your new movies, or anything else for that matter? Check out TreNotes, a new hierarchical list organizer.

Tired of reading e-mail on your Pocket PC? Would you rather have your Pocket PC read it to you? Then you'd better take a look at the iSpeak review.

Also reviewed below are the PrintBoy CE printer utility for the Pocket PC and two new games: Cruzoe—an electronic crossword puzzle game—and Diamond Mine.

Would you like to watch full-length movies on your Pocket PC? Pocket PC Films offers classic films and TV shows, indies, and feature films in Windows Media Video format and optimized for viewing on the Pocket PC. They sent me the video version of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2002 Edition. The video and audio quality was very good on my iPAQ 3850 without the headphone, although Pocket PC Films recommends that you use a headphone for best results when listening to audio.

The videos come on a CD with an installation program that makes it very easy to copy the film or video to your Pocket PC. It takes about 10 minutes to copy a 90-minute video onto your Pocket PC with a USB connection. One minute of video from Pocket PC Films takes approximately 1 MB of space to store, so a typical 90-minute film would take approximately 90-100 MB of space for storage, meaning you'll need a high-capacity storage card for storing and viewing one of these films. I store my movies on a 1 GB CompactFlash card from Kingston Technologies (www.kingston.com). SanDisk (www.sandisk.com) also makes a 1 GB CF card. If your Pocket PC has an SD slot you should check out the 512 MB SD cards from Panasonic (www.panasonic.com) and Lexar Media (www.lexarmedia.com). If you have an iPAQ with a PC Card Expansion Pack, take a look at the 2 GB and 5 GB PC Card drives from Toshiba (www.toshiba.com) and Kingston (www.kingston.com). IBM (www.ibm.com) markets the 1 GB Microdrive, a Type II CompactFlash device.

Pocket PC Films provide shorts and full-length movies specially formatted for watching on your Pocket PC.

Some of the popular films whose videos are available include: Nightmaster, starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Jennings; Going Overboard, starring Adam Sandler; and Jackknife, starring Robert DeNiro and Ed Harris. Prices of the films vary from $5.99 for classic TV shows to $14.99 for feature films and more current fare. The videos are available at the Pocket PC Films Web site (www.pocketpcfilms.net).

TreNotes lets you create hierarchical lists that help you organize your projects, tasks, etc. You can add text or voice notes as well as file or URL links to any item in a list. You can assign a priority rating from 1 to 20 to each item, assign a category to an item, associate an icon with it, and choose the color in which the text will be displayed. You can enter the due date and the total duration of a task, and as you work on it, you can estimate the percentage you have completed and the progress bar will display the percentage graphically.