douglasamcintosh - 2005-06-21 9:39 AM
Have just purchased a simpad SL4 from eBay. Fingers crossed it is going to get here and work. Presuming it does so I have a few questions.
It is coming with Windows CE 4.0, is the upgrade
(for big money !
) to 4.2 worth it ?
I am intending to use the device for general too lazy to get up off the sofa type things.
Internet Browsing
Email
(POP and IMAP
)
eBook reading
(Mobipocket
)
PDF Reading
(fairly important
)
Instant Messaging
(Yahoo probably
)
RSS Reading
(important, should have offline storage
)
Doodling rude pictures and send them to people
Possibly using it as a remote control.
Is the above possible or should I just flash it with Linux ?
Thank you for any help.
Douglas
Hi there Doug,
if you got yours from buddify, the unit *should* be ok, as in brand new, though the paper box outside is a bit scratched up. Not sure if yours will be CE.NET 4.0 'cos mine arrived in HPC2000 image. There is another thread on flashing the SL4 to either a CE.NET4.0 or CE.NET4.1 or back to hpc2k. So use the search on that.
I myself flashed it to opensimpad and tried out. Works great! Only klunk was that the launcher defaults to scanning the *whole* CF card whenever I insert it in, causing the whole system to go into slo-mo. Eject it and its fine. Otherwise, the whole thing works great with opensimpad! wifi works, screen rotation works, PIM, internet
(Konqueror
) etc works.
In the end I switched back to CE.NET 4.1 on a
feeling hunch that a working driver for my wifi card was around the corner. Thanks for cmonex and c:amie's support, I tried practically every single driver for my Pretec wifi card, to no avail. Pretec recently got a new CE.NET 4.1 driver, so I got lucky and now it works great!
With CE.NET 4.1,
(PASSED
) IE5.5 - Internet Browsing
(I use gmail, Y! and hotmail. Have not tried pop/imap yet
) - Email
(POP and IMAP
)
(I use uBook. Works with fakedlls and hpc2k dlls
) - eBook reading
(Mobipocket
)
(comes with Ansyr 2.3. Works fine for the pdfs I use so far
) - PDF Reading
(fairly important
)
(Not tested
) - Instant Messaging
(Yahoo probably
)
(Not tested
) - RSS Reading
(important, should have offline storage
)
(There is MSPaint as free download and other freeware
) - Doodling rude pictures and send them to people
(I think there are remote apps abound. Sample code from ms too
) - Possibly using it as a remote control.
As it is, I find it not necessary to upgrade to CE.NET 4.2 as yet.
... and yes, no editor for excel etc. Only viewers. Look around in the start>program files ... there are four viewers, including one image viewer.