Neta 980 Lost its Mind

CMONEX, you haven't hurt my feelings...

I don't know what would be good for battery life on a unit of that type. It's about the same (as you stated) as a laptop.

Considering the screen size and that I am using a standard battery. I think it's OK.

The tablet is fairly light when compared to most laptops. Again, my main useage is as a reader. (My vision is not what it used to be.. getting older I guess.) I can adjust the text size and actually enjoy reading at night (with the lights out.). My main worry is dropping the thing on the floor if I doze off.

There is an extended battery available for the the Neta. It (like the Jornada's extended battery is supposed up to last twice as long.) The docking station will adjust for the larger battery. You can see the removable section behind my Jornada stylus in the picture. Batteries for the Neta are quite expensive (especially the extended battery). Having the second battery will make it easier if I need to do a rebuild in the future.

It gives me a better internet browsing experience than my Jornada because of the 800x600 screen. It does come with a nice wrap-around leather case that protects it if I take it on the road. I have used it as a substitute for a laptop (I currently do not own one.) and at the time I purchased it, it was much cheaper than any decent laptop.

Finally, I've enjoyed the challanges of using the Neta. If its getting it to do Network sync or installing a piece of software for HPC Pro that's what make it fun for me.

DG

yes, tft sucks power, so i prefer dstn lol.

anyway it isn't that simple, my intermec runs 5 hours with wifi all the time with the better battery (the other lasts 3.5 hours). and intermec does have a tft. but it has a powerful battery, 1800 mAh @ 10.8V.

so no, the ppc's don't run forever on a battery charge, especially if you're using wifi, their battery is so small, just like in a mobile phone. they last 1-2 hours with wifi.





glad to hear i haven't hurt them!

yeah the challenges make life more interesting lol

Hrm? My Piddle has a 3.7V 3000mAh battery on it. It'll run 12-14 hours w/o charging, but it does give my Piddle PC a fat rear end. Now, yeah a WiFi card really sucks the juice out of it, but still get a good 4 hours on WiFi before charging.

Oh, and I assume the NETA uses the same battery as the ViewPad, which is 14.4V and 1800mAh.

your pocketpc has an extended battery... i was talking about the standard batt AND wifi usage. say 3.7V 1500 mAh, then you get only 2 hrs of wifi with it!! hope you get now what i meant
oh and 4 hrs of wifi, just acceptable for me, i'm used to better runtimes

14.4V and 1800 mAh, well, then something is wrong there, maybe the 1800 is too low for such a screen, look at the netbook pro, it has 2400 mAh and can do more than 2 hrs of wifi if i'm not wrong.

So far, so good with the Airpanel 100 rom on the Neta 980. Irda does not seem to be working although the audio problems seem to have stopped. It is quite a different CE.net build vs the Neta. One key difference for me was the HTTPD server is not installed on the Airpanel ROM. We are testing Ce.net 4.2 handhelds at work with the HTTPD enabled. This allows use to easily create custom menus for our employees that use the handhelds. Perhaps someone can send me the files and the registry info for enabling this.

I'm also curious to know if the Airpanel 100 has a USB disaster recovery mode like the later Airpanel models. I can't get any docs from Viewsonic's site because they require a serial number to view documentation.

Another question I have is about printing under Ce.net. Has anyone managed to network print?

I'm averaging about 3 hours on the standard battery with WI-FI. Seems pretty good for a device this size.

Great to hear from you!

Sad to hear about the IRDA. (I wonder if the IR hardware is actually in the Netas?)

I don't really know what an HTTPD server is? (Unless it is the Terminal Services Remote Desktop??) Enlighten me!



I've not figured a good way of doing this. I can print plain text files to a network printer using Total Commander by Copying the text file and setting the target to a printer on my network. ie. (\\MyNetwork\Printer2) <- Whatever your shared printer name is on your network.) Not very satisfying and very limited...



That's pretty good!

I'm glad most things are working!

DG

Some CE.net devices (like the Neta) have the CE webserver enabled. Its just a basic webserver with no frills. We are testing using this on a couple of devices at my job for simple menus. On your Neta you should have a folder under the Windows directory called WWW. Its kind like the Inetpub folder on IIS enabled Windows boxes.

The PTAB software works great. Thanks for the help.



I know. I was quite shocked at the battery performance. I'm using an Orinoco Silver card that has been flashed to Gold firmware. My Neta is the fifth CE device I've used this card in. Bulletproof card with almost no problems. I've tried other cards but none compare with the Orinoco on performance or power usage. I've thought about switching to a CF wireless card but I don't know what will work with CE.net or if I'll get similar performance. I would like to have the PC card slot free to use a PCMCIA hard drive when I need more storage. I've got a couple laying around that I don't use and it would be nice to have 2gb of document storage when I'm traveling.

My next question for the forum is about hardware specs. Is there a program like Windows Device Manager that would tell me what devices are on the Neta. I would like to try and compile a linux kernel. The Simpad seems to have similar hardware but I can't find a .gz kernel for it. Tried other ARM kernels. They seem to boot but no display.

Thanks again David G for all your help

Tell me what you might need.

If I can pull it off the Neta ... It's yours..

Network Printing! A good solution!

I downloaded a trial copy of Jetcet Professional 2.1 (www.westtek.com)

I had to use the Wayback machine to get a copy.

The executable did not work on my machine. I changed it from an exe to zip extension and was able to extract all the files.

I installed it to the Neta. No problems on the installation. I opened Wordpad and a file. Clicked the Print... Got a dialog and sent it to my network printer. It kicked @ss!

Prints from PTAB, as well, with formating.
On the second printing it remembered the settings etc.

I am currently trying to test a newer (pocket pc) version. I'll let you know if that works. The older version works great.

I can set you up with a link to the if you need to test.

DG

A follow up on the PPC2003 version of JetCet and the Neta!:

I extracted the CABS from the 4.X version of JetCet.

Bad Deal. Not only did it not work but it trashed the settings for the reinstall of version 2.1 trial.

I am doing an Activesync restore on the Neta now. (Done ... It fixed the issue .... )

Grab an old version if you can. Where you might get a code is anyones guess.

Westtek does not have any information at all on their web site on the older versions. It would be nice if they would consider putting the old version in our Support Library!!

DG

hehe. the bsquare phh has it too (disabled by default but should be easy to enable)

I never realized that was there. I checked it out... Its cool!
I don't know what I would do with it. I can see where it may be useful for your task.

We experimented with the Neta 985 and Citrix. The Neta was the terminal with the app on the Citrix server. It worked pretty good with some custom MS Access Forms.





SysInfo Retriever runs pretty good on the Neta (It requires Toolhelp.dll from the HPC2000 SDK to run.) However.... While it supplies a great deal of information. It doesn't go nearly far enough on the hardware.

Maybe cmonex has some good utilities she's hidden away!

DG

i dunno, what do you need?

whats this sysinfo retriever btw?

something like Windows Device Manager that may tell us more about the sound system, display hardware.


One of the best programs of this type I've seen for the PC is BeLarc Advisor. It finds so much stuff it's scary. Belarc Advisor Software Download 950kb

I've never seen anything like it for the CE machines. I know that some folks visiting this site have uncovered some nice gems to hack at the hardware.

System Info Retriever reminds me of some of the utilities I've seen for PC Window's installations (It's just not quite as poweful.).

System Info Retriever.

Thanks

DG

oh, i see. i'll try this app, thanks for it!

i have a few cool little tools to see things but i'm afraid they are not what you're looking for. still they're pretty nice.. latest find is a serious taskmanager showing info on such stuff i didn't even know about not just tasks and processes but windows and cpu usage for each process, etc...
or there's a battery meter which will tell you about how much mA your device currently consumes. sadly it would not work on my devices, showed just 0 mA but who knows about the neta for example..
or the phm tools showing info on resources, com ports, etc. (saves the time to go into the registry)
or dexxta's ceprocessviewer
and so on.. love these little things

Quote

cmonex - 2006-04-12 6:05 PM

...and so on.. love these little things

I totally agree!

There is nothing better than small, elegant utility. I truely admire the programmers that can take a small piece of code and make something marvelous happen! My first thought... it's magic!!!

Very few of the people I know would not even begin to understand or appreciate these gems!

Post some of them on your site, if you get a chance (or good links to them!)

DG

Edited by David G 2006-04-13 10:30 PM