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Pocket PC on Wi-Fi Mark Needham detects wireless activity and takes a trip down memory lane with Boney M n increasing number of Pocket PCs, and some Palm OS-based machines such as the new Sony UX50, now come with built-in wireless networking just like many current laptops. I’m still using an iPAQ H5450, one of the first PDAs to have Wi-Fi built in, but even within the iPAQ range this model has now been superseded, first by the H5550 and more recently by the H4150.Since wireless networking creates a heavy drain on the battery, it doesn’t switch itself on automatically when you start up a Pocket PC machine – to turn on the Wi-Fi under both Pocket PC 2002 and 2003 OSes, select Settings from the Start menu and choose the Connections tab.

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On the iPAQ, Wi-Fi is represented by a green triangle icon as shown in screenshot 1.Tap this and you come to the wireless network detector screen in screenshot 2: this screen allows you to use your Pocket PC as a sniffing device. As an aside, in the US, Targus sells a small electronic box for $20 described as, ‘the first and only Wi-Fi detector on the market today – you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up. Just press a button and the Kensington Wi-Fi Finder instantly lets you know if your location is ‘hot’. No software or computer needed. What could be easier?’ Had the late, lamented Innovations catalogue not died,

this product could have been a prime candidate for inclusion. Surely, if you travelled so much that you were constantly looking for Wi-Fi networks, you wouldn’t want to carry the extra weight of a device that has no other function? But if you already carry a Pocket PC, using the ‘sniffing’ screen does provide a quicker way of looking for a network than powering up your laptop. When trying this myself, I’ve often been surprised how few places in South East England have a detectable network – I thought the airwaves of London were supposed to be stiff with signals. If you press the New button in the sniffing

screen, you’ll arrive at screenshot 3, the Profile Wizard. The profile name it asks for could be something like ‘Work’ or ‘Home’ or ‘Starbucks’. Each wireless network has an SSID, which is, in a way, the name of the network. Every packet of information sent out over the network includes this SSID, so that if two networks are operating in the same space a client device knows which packets to pick up and which to ignore. An SSID isn’t usually secret – it’s included in each data packet as plain text – and usually it’s displayed on a sign somewhere on the wall in public Wi-Fi zones, or is given out by your system administrator at work. As for the three other settings in the wizard,

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I’m sure there’s a good technical reason for the bizarre grouping of countries in the regions box (see screenshot 3), but all I can tell you is that ‘Rest of World’ seems to work in London. The two settings hidden beneath the drop-down box in the screenshot work when set to ‘Auto’ for me. There are two more screens-full of Wi-Fi settings, most of which can be simply left set to their defaults. You’ll almost certainly be using a server-assigned IP address, for example, which means you don’t have to fill in any of the other boxes on screenshot 4. Unless you really need security, the boxes on screenshot 5 can be skipped over as well. While it’s good fun trying out Wi-Fi on your PDA, the sad fact is that it’s far less useful than connecting a laptop or PC to a wireless network. Apart from the frighteningly short battery life, most websites are the wrong size to fit a PDA screen, though an enlightened few have taken the bother to optimise their content for small screens, particularly news sites like the BBC and The Register. Microsoft lists a number of these sites in links that are pre-installed into Pocket Internet Explorer. You can also use a PDA as a Wi-Fi radio, carrying an Internet radio signal round the house or (to irritate your colleagues) round the office. USING THE IPAQ 2210 On Brighthand (www.brighthand. com), the publisher Steven G. Bush made me jealous by showing a picture of his local Starbucks in sunny Tampa, Florida, where he browses the Internet on an H2210 while sipping an iced latte. He describes there how he set up his Wi-Fi connection using Windows Mobile 2003 (rather than 2002 as in these screenshots). ‘At Starbucks, I popped the 802.11b card into my iPAQ and turned on the device. Once I launched Internet Explorer, a New Network Connection bubble popped up. It asked whether I’d like to connect to ‘tmobile’ – the SSID, or network

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identifier, for any T-Mobile HotSpots found at Starbucks – and whether this network connects to The Internet or to Work. Another way to think of these two options is ‘The Internet’ means your ISP and ‘Work’ means your company’s Virtual Private Network (VPN). I selected the former and tapped the Connect button. The next screen to appear was T-Mobile’s HotSpot login screen, where you can either log in or sign up for service. For first-timers, Starbucks offers a special one-day rate of $2.99. Otherwise, you can go ahead and sign up for monthto-month service ($39.99 a month) or yearly service ($29.99 a month). While Bush may be happy to pay for his logon, however, there are increasing reports on the Internet that few other people do want to pay. In the US, anyone buying a Big Mac and fries at a Wi-Fienabled McDonalds gets an hour’s free use, which is apparently encouraging more customers to risk their digestion with McDonalds’ products. In the UK, McDonalds and BT made an announcement that BT Openzone will be available at a number of UK outlets of the fastfood chain, but this will be entirely on a subscription basis. Surely, if you can afford BT Openzone’s pricing schedule, you can afford to eat somewhere better than McDonalds?

5mx every day to write notes on during the journey. I’ve never been able to find anything else that works as well. Can you recommend anything as a substitute, and what happened to Psion anyway?’ I told him that the Sony CLIÉ PEG-UX50 seems to be the first new palmtop

UX50. The device has no hardware HotSync or Contacts buttons – to get your addresses up on the screen or perform a HotSync, you have to scroll through on-screen options. Its £500 street price is expensive for a consumer product, but it’s a welcome sign of diversity. Every so often, customers ask me if

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON ‘I used to commute to London on the train,’ said one PDA user I met the other day, ‘and I used the Psion

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computers.The proximate cause was the year 2001, when Psion – in common with a lot of other technology firms – lost pots of money. A project to develop a machine with Motorola was cancelled, sales of handheld organisers stayed low, and it was forced to write £65 million off the book value of Teklogix, a business it had bought only the previous year. In response, Psion laid off everyone involved with making and selling handheld computers, a business that had taken almost 20 years to create, and the shares still fell. I went to the AGM that followed this announcement, and after all the speeches had been made I ended up standing next to the then Chief Executive of Psion plc in the gents: ‘I hope you’re not holding too much Palm inventory,’ he said cheerily as we went about reducing our

Surely, if you can afford BT Openzone’s pricing, you can afford to eat somewhere better than McDonalds? since Psion’s last model, with a keyboard on which you can imagine typing anything substantial. Its reversible display looks very flash, but the Qwerty keyboard is very small, strictly two-thumbs rather than touch typing. While the Palm and Pocket PC models seem to get more and more similar to each other, Sony continues to come up with unusual offerings like the

Psion went bust – it didn’t. Psion is still listed on the stock exchange, but it’s more of a shell company than a real enterprise. Psion owns a business called Teklogix, which is run from Canada these days, plus a percentage of Symbian. To preserve this shell, the Board dismantled the company that most people knew as Psion, the bit that sold handheld

fluid inventory, ‘there’s going to be a bloodbath in the consumer market this year.’ There was. Palm in particular had huge stocks of unsold computers, which led to a drastic slide in prices and margins. PalmOne is still losing money today and is only predicting a return to profit in 2005. But at the end of that period, there will still be a Palm business – when Symbian is sold or floated off, Psion will only be a memory. There’s a book to be written on how such a well-known name all but vanished, and the search for a title would be easy: ‘Remember Psion and weep.’

● MARK NEEDHAM

‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, the-e-ere we wept, when we remembered Psion.’

Mark Needham is managing director of Widget UK Ltd, a distributor of mobile computing accessories. Please send comments to [email protected]

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