Pocketmac

Dear All

I just had a reply from Pocketmac.net after asking them about HandheldPC support in a future version of their Macintosh-to-PocketPC syncing program. Their website has long claimed to be working on this but I seem to remember Chris Tilley of HPC Factor being told last year that they were no longer interested in supporting our platform due to lack of interest from the HPC community. After all, not many people ever had HPCs compared to PocketPCs and many of those who did will have gone over to the keyboardless side. Factor in the Mac user's traditional hatred of all things Micro$oft and you'd predict a very small market.

Well, I wrote an email pointing out:
a) the sheer number of HPC devices, even if you limit it to WinCE 3.0 (thanks to HPC Factor for providing an extensive list of machines on their website).

b) the fact that many PC users are now switching to Macs thanks to the alluring new iMac and Mac mini, plus many notebook buyers are choosing iBooks rather than PC versions (including this Powerbook owner). A lot of these ex-PC owners will also be HPC owners.

Add those two factos together and you have a potentially large number of people who now have a HPC and a mac and would be intertested in PocketMac. Given that HPCs have the same underlying OS and ARM processor that many PocketPCs have, the amount of work required to make PocketMac compatible with a HPC is small price copared to the number of potential customers that could be gained. The list of potential buyers gets much larger if PocketMac is adapted to work with WinCE 2.11 and 2.0

I had two rapid responses from PocketMac after pointing out the above, the best of which was:
**********************************************************
Thank you very much, Nick, for your very detailed comment about prior
version handheld devices.
I passed it right along to our development department.
I am not sure if this year's schedule would allow compatibility testing with
older devices, but your point is excellent, and we will look at that market.

Thanks again!
Sincerely,
Anne M. Brengle, MBA
PocketMac® Team
**************************************************************
Fingers crossed! Apologies for the long post but I thought it of extreme interest to anyone who owns a Mac or is tempted to buy a shiny white 'big brother' for their iPod. If you have or want a Mac PLEASE EMAIL POCKETMAC and request HPC support in the next version! Check out what you are missing at www.pocketmac.net

Nic

Nic,

Back when I contacted them, (you spoke to someone else from your contact) effectively they were readily open to consider doing it, all these asked me to do was to ask H/PCers to drop them a line with information on their device(s) and a note showing support.
PocketMac were exceptionally open, interested and very reasonable in their comments

To my knowledge only three people aside from myself did so. Hence no port.

What could see a change in attitude is if MacOS X is going to appear on an x86 platform and become a retail OS for the IBM PC. If that happens, PocketMac will find their potential customer base infinitely enlarged.

I for one would like to see H/PC users given the option so Entourage sync - I think Microsoft not bundling their own PDA sync services with it, but including Palm's is arrogant and above all stubborn. It's nothing more than an attempt to marginalise the Apple, when in reality Apple and the vast, vast, vast majority of users really don't care about it, and certainly don't care for their tactics.
I'm no Apple user myself, but IMO, PocketMac are doing MS, and the community a favour.

I'd be interested in PocketMac too....

Used it before when I was using PPC's a few years ago...did some testing of it for them...

Even met one of the owners (blanking on his name right now, but I can find it...) of the company at 2 separate MacWorlds a few years back...

Will email him soon...will post his reply....

HTH,

Mark

Well....just got a reply from someone at PocketMac named 'Mark', no reply from the other fellow I mentioned in my previous post...

Unfortunately, not a positive response...

Here it is:

"Hi,

Windows Mobile Pocket PC version 2003 or later is required for PocketMac
support of Pocket PCs. We don't have versions to support older devices at
this time. Sorry!

Mark"


His response seems a bit odd as I asked him about HPC2000 and WinCE.net device support....I thought that WinCE.net devices are a 'current' not 'older' device???

Mark

* Deleted Duplicate Post *



Edited by ArchiMark 2005-07-19 3:49 PM