Love it or loath it, most people are familiar with the PC gaming legend that is Tetris. One of the most ported games in history, available on PC's and consoles of all shapes, ages, sizes and descriptions, if you are a Tetris fan then your needs are likely well served on most platforms; but what about the Handheld PC?

John Ottini explores one such incarnation of the venerable brick stacking game in the form of Mikko Kankainen' CanTris version 091002. If you're a huge Tetris fan and have feel that you have a brick sized hole to fill in your H/PC life, or if the idea of pushing pushing bricks around for hours on end appeals then, without a word from us on the psychology of your obsession, it's over to John in his latest HPC:Factor review.

New Coke. Chia pets. Ashton Kutcher. All are bad ideas that should have been snuffed out before they emerged into public consciousness. All are things that make you scratch your head and say, "What in God's name were they thinking?"

In a highly opinionated and at times curious look at the worst technology ideas of the information systems era, PC World's Dan Tynan lists the "top 10" worst technology inventions of all time. After some frankly wacky ideas and the Nokia N-Gage, Handheld PC fans may find Mr. Tynan's second worst technology of all time somewhat hard to swallow, particularly as he has chosen to use our very own Chris Tilley as justification for his argument.

Enjoy the read (or the pain) and remember; we didn't write it!

CodePlex open-source developer Stefanov succeeded last year in compiling versions of the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 that are compatible with Windows CE 2.0, 2.01, and 2.11 devices, thereby breathing new life into these older Windows CE devices by allowing them to run many newer applications.

Now, Stefanov is considering working on a port of .NET CF 2.0 to Windows CE 2.xx and 3.0, opening the possibility of running many current Windows Mobile applications on legacy Windows CE devices.

Before embarking on this project, however, Stefanov is gauging the level of interest in such a project by asking Windows CE device users to vote in a poll on the CodePlex site. Members here who would like to bring .NET CF 2.0 to Windows CE 2.xx and Windows CE 3.0 devices are strongly encouraged to vote in the poll at the CodePlex page linked below.

In a surprise move this evening, Alpaxo software has announced the immediate suspension of development on the popular RedGear compatibility layer for Windows CE.

Citing shrinking market share for Windows CE companion devices, extended development time over that of standard application design and detrimental market impact from the hacking community as the main reasons for the decision, Kirk Meyer, lead developer and owner of Alpaxo software has made a decision that has confronted many Handheld PC developers in recent years; one of economics vs. desire to remain writing for the community.

For existing users, Alpaxo will continue to provide technical support to you until 1st December 2009 and at the time of writing, the program is still available to purchase for Windows CE 3.0, 4.1 and 4.2.

A3VS's flagship DVD and Video conversion application DVD Catalyst 3 offers the user an integrated, single interface to convert DVDs and almost any existing PC/Mac video file into a format optimised for the memory and processor requirements of mobile devices.

For a limited time, A3VS are offering DVD Catalyst 3.77.1 for $9.95 (USD) a 50% reduction on the list price, an offer that continues to be backed by their unrivalled 7-day unrestricted trial period.

DVD Catalyst 3 comes with unrestricted profiles for a multitude of past and current mobile devices including PDA's, PNA's, cell phones, portable games devices, portable music players and of course the Handheld PC.

For Handheld PC users, the program includes the unique "Screen Rating" capability which can be used to generate optimised video to meet your H/PC's technical capabilities.

DVD Catalyst 3.77.1 can be purchased securely from the A3VS website.

Just how many Handheld PC devices remain in use out there? Who has the most devices? What is the most popular device? What is the most obscure?

Interesting questions, but questions that are not easy to answer through traditional means such as the forum. It got us thinking however, and as such we have decided to pilot a new site service that is designed to try and help us to answer some of those questions.

The initial version of HPC:Factor's "Handheld PC Census" is designed to test the community response to us collecting information on your devices. We are bundling the service as a member server for all registered forum members to provide us with details of their general Handheld PC hardware as per the established devices outlined in the HPC:Factor Devices & Specification system.

At the current time, registered users can add their devices via their forum control panel "your Settings", and the system will automatically generate a device list on the member profile page. This information will help us to gather initial information on device quantity; however, we are very interested in hearing your views as to whether we should seek to collect more information through this service.

For example, we could collect serial numbers to provide members with a 'security repository' in the event of theft, we could collect information on what you paid for each device so as to help generate average device prices or we could collect local information to gain a picture of the international device use of the different hardware.
Let us know what you think in the discussion, and in the mean time log-in and head to "Your Settings" in the forum to tell us about your Handheld PC collection.

Microsoft have released to manufacturing the second service pack for the Microsoft Office System 2007 suite of applications.

Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes all previously released updates for Office 2007 as well as including some new features and many new stability and performance enhancements. The highlights of the release include:

• Built-in Save As PDF/XPS support (without requiring a plug-in)
• Improvements to the graphics sub-system performance
• Excel chart enhancements to restore some of the missing functionality from Office 2003
• The ability to uninstall the service pack
• Significant Outlook start-up & shutdown performance improvements See 954914 for a cleanup tool
More reliable
• Outlook calendar updates
• Search reliability
• RSS improvements in Outlook
• Provides faster file resaves in PowerPoint 2007

The download for SP2 weighs in at over 290MB and is available for all Office System 2007 releases running on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3. For a full list of changes see 953195.

Bye Design LTD has released a new vesion of it's popular Windows CE spreadsheet software - SpreadCE.

This latest version includes the following improvements:

Several bug fixes.

Now allows fixed decimal places up to 30.

CSV load now handles items of any length and speeded up CSV save.

Tab key now skips locked cells on protected sheets.

Allows more rows/column when selecting sort keys.

Improved support for very large xls files, date parsing and Goal Seek routine.

Increased size of Data > Form dialog box.

Allows for longer text strings in Find/Replace dialog box.

Added support for Shift+Page Up/Down, Alt+Page Up/Down, Ctrl+insert for copy, Shift+insert for paste.

Handles UNC hyperlinks.

Support Paste Special from system clipboard.

Added Entry assistant toolbar

Added Paste Special > Transpose option.

Added GET.WORKBOOK function & GET.WORKSPACE function.

Added Romanian version.

Fixed some menu option translations in Brazilian Portuguese version.

NOTE: (Some SH3/4 versions are still at level 1.20)

SpreadCE 2.03 is available for almost all Handheld PC processors and Operating Systems. The software is also available in multiple languages.

The Shareware version is free and not time-limited, if you like what you see, please register the software, so Bye Design LTD can continue to provide us with this product in the future.

Outlook Express (remember that?); it may have been 7 years since it was last updated, but for many it still remains a viable and much used mail client that is as synonymous with Windows versions back to 3.11 as the concept of the task manager.

If you are using one of the Outlook Express releases as your mail client, then you may be wondering if it's possible it get more out of your PC / H/PC relationship than you are able to do with the standard ActiveSync offering.

Rich Hawley has a quick look at some of the different solutions that are available to Outlook Express users in "Outlook Express Synchronisation Solutions".