Experts Online

A StowAway / iGo driver (multiplatform) compliance test report

Werner Ruotsalainen — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 08:56:49 -0600

Upon my fellow blogger Tim Hillebrand’s report and because I’ll need to quickly enter a lot of info at MWC (and I don’t want to lug around my desktop replacement and, therefore, pretty heavy IBM Thinkpad a31p just for inputting text), I’ve installed the latest StowAway / iGo Bluetooth drivers on all my mobile devices (even non-Windows Mobile ones) to find out whether the drivers available HERE are (still) compatible with the latest operating system / firmware versions. I’ve found out the following:

Windows Mobile

Pocket PC’s (a.k.a. WM6 Classic / Professional):

HP iPAQ hx4700 (WM5 AKU 3.5.2; selecting & using the Widcomm driver, NOT the MS one); HTC Universal (WM6), Dell Axim x51v (WM5 official A12 (AKU 2.3) ROM with the MS BT stack), HTC Wizard (mfrazzz’ XDA Mobile 6 Release 5 FINAL) and the WM2003 HP iPAQ 2210: all work OK with the factory, default driver.

(Note that, as far as mfrazzz’ XDA Mobile 6 releases are concerned, version 3 was a no-go at all: it didn’t even try to connect. Pressing the Disable built-in HID support doesn’t help at all – unlike with all my other test devices or the same Wizard running Release 5.)

Smartphones (a.k.a. WM6 Standard)

HTC Vox / s710 (factory WM6 Smartphone ROM); no native driver; therefore, I tested it with the s620 / Excalibur / MteoR driver (they’re the same – actually, it seems ALL HTC Smartphones have the same drivers, unlike with WM5 and pre-WM5 Pocket PC’s): OK

HTC Oxygen / s310 with the above MS SP drivers (no native driver): the config app doesn’t even load (“Keyboard driver not functioning!”); then, after closing it, I started to get system errors about the keyboard driver DLL not responding.

Think Outside Stowaway driver 4.4 has been released

Werner Ruotsalainen — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:47:33 -0600

http://www.thinkoutside.com/

I've always been a big fan of the Think Outside Stowaway (TO SA for short) foldable keyboards, especially the Bluetooth (BT for short) ones. When folded, they're considerably thinner, smaller and lighter than any of the alternative keyboards (the Chainpus - also know as Brando or Freedom - BT keyboard, the HP BT keyboard or, as far as Symbian keyboards are concerned, the Nokia one) while having the largest possible keys (unlike those of, say, the Chainpus) and having no battery life problems (unlike that of the HP BT keyboard). They surely have their own share of problems, especially their price and the weak, easy-to-break latch; still, I think its price/performance ratio is the best. Think Outside's support is pretty good, as far as releasing new driver versions is concerned. Their latest one, version 4.4, was released just a few days ago, two months after the previous one, 4.3. In the last few days, I've actively been using it to find out if it's really better than previous versions and is, therefore, worth downloading.

ThinkOutside StowAway 4.3 keyboard driver and PPC2k2

Werner Ruotsalainen — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 02:54:21 -0600

http://smartphonemag.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19296

Pocket PC 2002 users, beware: if you have any kind of ThinkOutside StowAway keyboard, do not get its latest, version 4.3 driver because it's totally incompatible with your operating system. Please note that, much as ThinkOutside does list several PPC2k2 devices on their homepage (the iPAQ 1910, the Toshi e310, the non-upgraded iPAQ 39xx/545x etc.), they offer exactly the same (unified) driver suite ZIP for all downloads - the downloads are definitely not device/operating system-specific. So, it seems it's futile to try to find a different, PPC2k2-compliant version 4.3 ZIP file.