A while back I bought an IPAQ 4300, not so much because I need a PDA but because I wanted to get used to using one as several of my customers are doing some work with PDA based software. So I’ve been using the thing off an on, here and there.

My first impression is that this software is just not ready for anything useful except for those poor folks who have chronical disconnection anxiety. <g> Just kidding. I’ve found having a PDA useful at times, but I certainly don’t feel like I couldn’t be without it.

There are several things that really surprised me and that is how difficult it is to configure the wireless connection and how little useful content is actually out there for these PDAs.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get IPAQ to connect to the Internet in my office and also outside on various open wireless LANs. The best use for the PDA IMHO is being able to connect somewhere in the city and check maps, guides and movie listings/locations etc. since I travel a bit. Even in a little coastal town (when I was out on a windsurfing trip a couple weeks back) there’s usually one or two wireless connections bleeding out from somebody’s house… (is that breaking and entering? <g>)

The thing is that the IPAQ is finding usable connections easily enough but getting it to actually use any of the connection to connect through to the internet is an exercise in contortionism. The actual settings are buried under 4 levels of menus and sub tabs and there are several combinations you need to configure to get things to work right. None of this is obvious, and nowhere to be found in the sparse documentation.

To get an idea look at these very useful but ridiculously involved steps:

http://members.cox.net/ajarvi/WM2003/Connection_Manager/ConnectionManager.html

This is what eventually made things work.

Now why is this so much more complicated and more importantly so much different than the connection manager on my laptop? On my laptop I have an icon that shows my connection status (none on the PocketPc – WTF?) and a shortcut to show me available connections. Two clicks and I can decide whether I want to use one of the connections. Why should this be any harder on a little device? Shouldn’t this be easier even since this device pretty much lives by being online.

The other frustration is that I really didn’t find any good PocketPC or general PDA resources for common things that you might do. For example, I was in Portland the other night and decided to go see a movie, so I figured this is perfect for using the PDA to look up movies, locations and times. By the time I did all that I could have run 5 times to the corner have pulled out the Mercury (local event listings), looked up the stuff and have been at the movie theatre probably.

Maybe I’m not looking in the right places for this stuff, but I searched on Google for a while for PDA optimized sites and I couldn’t find any. Instead I was able to get to a handful of regular movie sites (Yahoo actually was the best of the bunch except it has limited listings) and scroll my way through full Web pages on the mini screen. Ironically many of the major movie search sites didn’t want to run at all because they’re expecting a high end multi-media capable browser apparently sniffing out browsers by User agent.

I also spent some time looking at a handful of utilities I downloaded and installed to the PDA and most of those were pretty trashy, or did hokey things like perform lookups and send you to a Web site via the internal browser. Mind you not PDA optimized pages either…

Somehow I had it in mind that PDA use and content for it would be pretty common by now but I suppose I was wrong and that’s somewhat disappointing.

I hope I’m just missing something – anybody know of any good resources for the stuff I’m talking about above?

Of course the main reason I got the IPAQ was to doing some programming for the thing, unfortunately I haven’t had time to look at that, but there are a few things that I need to implement for an application I’m building for a client – it’ll be interesting  to see how well that goes.