That's been my personal challenge over the past year or so. I've managed to amass a small collection of CE 6 netbooks, mostly WM8505s like your Sylvania that I managed to snag cheap on eBay. Because Windows Mobile 5 and 6 are based on earlier CE builds, I've been finding lots of freeware apps online to test, finding that many of them can be made to work with the DLLs that are already onboard the WM8505.
(So you really don't need the iPAQ.
)
Stuff I can do with my CE 6 netbook:
1
) Most of my Web browsing. Opera Mini 5.1 is a very good browser, and I've had good experience with others as well, including Iris, iSee, ZetaKey, and - yes - IE CE 6. I can view the desktop versions of most sites without a problem
(though Facebook struggles
). Embedded video is of course an exception
(though my Zenithink ZT-180 tablet handles this quite well in IE CE 6
), but in addition to the YouTube app, there are at least three Windows Mobile programs
(YouTubePlay, Web Video Downloader, and Smooth YouTube Downloader
) designed to download videos to play on-device. Also, pretty much anything else I want to download
(images, documents, CAB files, etc
) I can download directly onto the CE 6 netbook if I want to.
2
) Lots of types of word processing. Like you, I plan to buy SoftMaker Office for CE to make one of my CE 6 netbooks do what my PC still doesn't do: read DOCX and XLSX files. There are also tons of free Notepad-style apps for CE devices, many with extra features.
3
) Video and still image viewing and playing of MP3s and other audio files. There are tons of free image viewer apps that work very well, including a couple that even allow you to modify the images. TCPMP
(and Geared2003's version, HPC Media Player
) still handles video and audio quite well, and there are lots of other free audio players that handle multiple formats. NCH Software even has a CE app called Pocket WavePad that allows you to add effects to audio tracks.
(The freeware version, while limited in features, still has some pretty cool ones.
)
4
) Organizing information. There are many, many programs that help users organize various kinds of information, and even without the ability to synchronize with a PC and without the old standard CE PIM databases, some PIM applications
(eg, TecAce cePIMS
) will work using their own databases, and there is a small applet developed by folks who have unlocked the embedded CE shell from the Mio GPS that creates the PIM databases, making even more third-party PIM apps usable
(though still not synchronizable with a PC
).
5
) Lots and lots of games.
('Nuff said.
)
I rarely take my PC with me when I leave my house in the morning, because 99% of what I want to do can be done comfortably on my CE netbooks.
(One day I'll learn how to write my own programs for CE - I can only hope that I can do most of it on the CE device itself.
)
