SimPad: Internal Bluetooth mod and Win CE?

I found a couple of DIY mods to add a Bluetooth (and in one case also an internal MMC card) to a SimPad. At first glance they seem to be doable for someone without two left hands:

http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/simpad/blue/
http://www.guylhem.net/r-hardware/simpad/bluetooth/

The thing is, both mods are for Linux-based Simpads (softwarewise, that is) and Linux is notoriously complete on weird drivers. Has anyone tried these mods with Windows CE?

Ya, the mod is currently for linux only. The stumbling block is the drivers layer.

I've also seen someone mod the SL4 to take a SD card ... and yes, its for linux only as well.

hm... what problems does simlinux have? this sounds so tempting (well, it would if i were a simpad user)

For me there's only one problem: no Calligrapher! (I come from the Newton world)

Other than that, Linux is the bee's knees as far as securing the future of your HPC goes.

Bit of a bummer.

I guess I'll have to wait until the folks at XStroke get there. Apparently there's a new developer on board who intends to convert XStroke to a full handwriting recognition engine. For Linux, of course.

I just don't like character recognizers of Graffiti ilk; the first thing I did when I bought my Fujitsu Stylistic 3400 tablet, was to add PenOffice to it (it was to replace my Newtons, but its battery life turned out too miserable for that purpose). I reckon the first thing I'll do when my SimPad arrives will be to install Calligrapher on it as well (it comes with Transcriber, but PenCommander really is the best program ever written for tablet pcs).

What can I say? I like handwriting...

lucky you i like it too but cant get any program to reliably recognize my handwriting (also i'm afraid to scratch the display - that can be solved with a screenprotector though)

My Newtons (MessagePads 2100) give (yes, I still have and use them) me 99+% accuracy in English and 95+% in Dutch (mainly because the Dutch ditionaries, being a volunteer effort, are not as extensive as the English ones), both with cursive handwriting (the Newton cursive recognizer is an earlier version of Calligrapher). Writing in printed (separated) letters, which invokes a different recognizer on the Newton (called Rosetta, and property of Apple), is even more accurate but, obviously, not as fast.

PenOffice (with the Calligrapher recognizer) on Windows 2000 is almost as accurate; the problem there is Windows, which was never intended to be a pen-centric OS and requires some weird hacks to get a Newton-esque feeling.

Re scratches: it has been my experience that the vast majority of scratches come from a "polluted" stylus (i.e.: dirt on the tip). I tend to not use screen protectors, except on my SE P910, but over the years I've developed the strange but quite effective habit of regularly licking the tips of my styli. It must work, because none of my pen computers has a scratch on it. Well, that and an almost religeous zeal to prevent any harm befalling on the stylus; treat it as if it were made of fairy dust and you're probably going to be okay.

amazing newtons! though i'm afraid i would get 0% accuracy in hungarian.. i tried to write in english on a ppc, got 50% maybe with transcriber and it was slooow so i'll stick to hpc's!

thanks for the idea on the stylus as well!

well, wll, sorry for starting the off topic

I used my MessagePad for over a year to take notes on weekly meetings on a construction site. These were the actual minutes of the meetings, written by hand! The project architect, who had to take notes as well, had started out by bringing a notebook pc (a nifty IBM thingy, IIRC) to the meetings, but, after one of the meetings took place on a scaffolding two storeys high, "devolved" back to pen and paper. And I was still able to point him out the odd error [heh heh heh].

Most people today focus on the shortcomings of the early MessagePads and never experienced how good the platform actually became.

Just before its plug was yanked, of course...

But may I be allowed to vere off even more from the yellow-bricked on-topic road and point out the following link:

http://www.kallisys.com/newton/einstein/

Paul Guyot is the greatest of the gurus of the Newton users community and has been working on a way to run NewtonOS on hardware it was never intended for. He has come a very long way in two years and I am very pleased to learn that the Siemens SimPad is one of the computers Einstein (the Linux-based "emulator" of Newton) actually runs on (as the SimPad is basically a grown-up Z, there was apparently remarkably little work to do to get it going). See the link to the last picture on the page.

The project is far from finished and needs a lot more work, but the basis has been laid so who knows, maybe plain Linux will not be the only upgrade possibility for HPCs?

wow this is interesting!! thanks for the infos.

I had other plans for my SL4 but linux looks more promising than my plans. Once I replace my UPS batteries it's time to flash....