I have absolutely no use for it, but i would love to have a Commodore 64 or another system of the same type. They're really cool. Just finding a broken one would make a cool show piece tbh
This is giving me a glimpse of what the fast-paced business person of the early 2000s life was like. I can smell the coffee, airport business class, client dinners and boardroom meetings already
Is it just me or did companies go out of business faster back then there where so many huge companies that made one or 2 mistakes and where gone in a few years but todays corporations seem to be able to get away with much more.
My father purchased a pocket pc in my youth, and I remember them being soooooo pricey when he decided to buy one. He bought one, and then the same night we went to a restaurant next to the bestbuy. He opted not to get a warranty, and slipped it in his back pocket just sitting on the soft seat of the truck was enough to crack the screen. He never even got to use it. You can only imagine the anger thru that meal. Not a word was spoken lol
that was the major downfall of those devices back then, because of how the touch screen works, once its cracked its done, you cannot use it at all. anything that uses a stylus for touchscreen purposes is a dual layer screen, you have the glass a very thin gap between then the plastic layer on top. you press on the plastic payer and it determines the position of where it is being touched, and compared to the multi touch we have today, those screens are only capable of one touch input at the same time. take the Nintendo DS line for example. that is a bit more modern look at the technology but still worked the same as these devices, and they are much cheaper to make too.
I remember i was at a family reunion, and had mine in my cargo pocket in a case. and i was on a playground spinning my little cousins on one of those spinning wheels of death. I jumped on and one of the bars smacked me in the leg and destroyed my iPAQ.
Yea same here for some reason i thought they where way less advanced i must have been thinking of my very bad experience when someone showed me one from the 1990s with a monochrome screen and the pc syncing would always crash or take forever but these early 2000s versions look like they could have been very fun for me if i had my current levels of knowledge i could download stuff from the internet and then play it back on this thing in school even very low quality multimedia is better than just sitting still looking at clouds until the bus shows up or reading the same book over and over.
I had one as a Teen. Palm Zire 71. Found it in a pawnshop sometime 2005/06. I loved it. Used it as my camera mostly. My PSP served as my main media player at the time, even though the PDA had MP3 capabilities.Just the fact that it had a camera that even recorded video at that time was just awesome at the time for me. Even though it had potato quality. lmao
As a kid I remember being completely mind blown by how such small devices had 'Windows' running on them, I think at my old school just before I left the teachers started using them to take the class registers too which seemed so futuristic at the time - interesting how for the first year or so the iPhone was essentially just a glorified version of these too until the App Store came along and literally changed everything overnight
The first iPhone was a different beast to these: it actually worked. These things were essentially expensive executive toys: they were terribly slow, clunky and limited.
I remember when early 2000s cartoons had these for characters who were portrayed as "techie." Like Tucker in _Danny Phantom_ who always had his PDA with him, or Wade who invented the glorified PDA that was the Kimmunicator on _Kim Possible._
I was lucky enough to work for a company where I could get these dirt cheap back in the day (ex customer returns) I had (and still have) the Toshiba E800 with an ibm micro drive used it for watching AVIs of south park , low bitrate mp3s, internet browsing and emulators and yes doom. They were the days lol
I had a teacher in 4th grade (2004) that knew I collected cellphones. The day he came to my class and gave me his “old” ipaq I nearly shat myself in front of everyone! Went from B&W bar phones and a few B&W flip phones to that thing. Blew my mind what that thing could do!
Having lived through this time as an IT tech, I both understand why these sorts of devices existed and am SO SO SO glad that they died when smartphones appeared. In a vacuum they worked...fine. But trying to get them to play nice in the most common business computing environments of the time was a nightmare.
The 80s-2000s were fun because almost nothing technology related was standardized. It was always a surprise to see a new, weird, unique device and you were always a early adopter of a device you didn't knew if it will have a upgrade the following year. Also, some technology had some very good features that today are missing.
I got a Windows CE device in 1999. I'm an engineer who's teaching in China. You can't get on the subway without your smartphone to show your 48 hour PCR test and health code. I keep saying to those peasants at the subway security gate that only early adopters like me having internet connected technology in their pockets. You can't expect normal people to have it because you're all backwards and low-tech in China.
I love reliving these old devices, they bring back so many memories. This channel really does take me back, thanks to you and those gracious enough to donate to the channel so we can relive some of these devices.
Boy oh boy I remember my E755 I had back in the day. Basically this thing only thicker, with wifi, an SD and CF card slot, and a faster processor...with a removable battery that could be replaced with a very large extended battery.
This video just unlocked some memories. I had this exact Pocket PC in middle school- I bought it used for $50 from my dad’s business partner circa 2004-2005. That year for Christmas I got a foldable IR keyboard to work on essays and homework when I was stuck at school late for extra curriculars. (Pretty sure I used it like twice.) I even found a media player app with an iPod skin and a (somewhat) functional touchscreen click wheel. Fun times with that thing. I need to look for it next time I’m at my parents’ house 😂
Oh gosh. My father bought me exactly this one back in 2003 when I was in kindergarten. It was mindblowing. We used to draw some (kinda) cartoons in Paint.exe. It was so laggy, that it loaded layer after layer and it gave an illusion of animation
My dad had one with what looked like windows xp. loved drawing with the stylus. I wish I could remember what model it was though. Might've actually been windows mobile
damn this brings me back when i used to own a qtek 9100 (later rebranded as a HTC 9100). I loved the windows mobile operating system. i remember that i used to calculate how many apps/games i could install. 2mb apps where concidered HUUUGE you'd rather install apps not bigger then 100kb which is insane if you compare it to app sizes from today.
I bought a Dell Axim back in 2001-2002. I was so excited when I got it. It was during my first real job out of college. My co-workers thought I was a dork for sure. I still have it, all the cables, the original box and manuals. Brings back lots of memories.
I still say anybody who has a smartphone should be a called a dork. Because in the past people were against me for having a pocket computing device. Now they're against me for NOT HAVING a pocket computing device. It's like you must conform or risk being called a dork.
I remember wanting one of these PDAs so hard back then, i found them mesmerizing despite their clear limitations. Now we've got smartphones that can do much more and better things PDAs could and we take that stuff for granted.
I still have my HP iPAQ HX2490B, and I absolutely miss using it! for the time it was made, it felt like I could do almost anything with it. I even shoehorned Windows Mobile 6.5 on it and ran some pretty useful "apps" on it too. It was what portable devices were meant to do, be, and what they should have stayed as.
I remember that my dad had a similar PDA than this one (Compaq iPAQ H3975), these were ahead of their times, especially with the touch screen. But the speaker was way better than the one on this video.
I still think that instead of calling smartphones "smartphones" I think they should have called them PDAs with phone capabilities. Smartphones are basically PDAs with a cell phone app installed. It's kind of weird to call them a phone when it does so much more.
this brings back a lot of memories... i used to have one WM pda as an electronic dictionary for school and an emulator for games, it run GBA and even PS1 games smoothly ! it was also my MP3 player and video player (had to use another 30 mins to transcode the original 20-min video first, though, LOL)
I ran a genesis emulator at full speed on a phone with the same CPU. I played Phantasy Star 4 all the way through on that thing while on the train. It was weird because my newer phone with a strongARM CPU couldn't run things nearly as well
I had an Ipaq 2210/2215 400 mhz. I did everything with it. It could play high quality mp3 and a videogame at the same time. I kept looking for the next model at least 600mhz without losing any current features. That never happened, phones got better. But there was still a long wait for those advancements. Then they were here, everywhere.
I had this exact model and bought it close to launch. It didn't have Wifi and was very limited in performance and storage space. I bought a 16MB or 32MB SD card so I could use it mostly as an MP3 player and to play games on the go. Sold it complete in box in the early 2010s for a great price to some guy who thought he was getting somekind of iPod.
This is bringing back dreaded memories of when I started working at Kohl's. Every scanning device we used had a version of Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called from 2009-2016) and they were HORRID. The first device we had wasn't so bad, but it was when we got new devices later on (a total of three through those years), the problems just kept getting worse and worse. They got so bad, in fact, that you couldn't do basic functions without apps crashing all the time and even random reboots. They would also sometimes reset themselves and you had to re-flash the devices to set them back to being usable in the store. All I remember of mobile Windows devices (especially phones) were just about bad the interface was. I'm a Windows user for life, but when it comes to mobile devices, give me iOS or Android any day.
i bought an ipaq3650 when i was in high school it had ppc2000. i actually worked at a computer store so i got a bit of a deal but it played that version of doom just fine, i bought it mostly for ppc quake which only ran about 8fps lol
I had an HTC xda, loaded with SimCity, Monkey Island and so on. Also came with your obligatory copy of word and excel. Great stuff couldn't be separated from it as a kid
I have a Dell pocket pc, next to the last model in fsct. It was awesome when it was new. Way faster then my older HP media connector I bought in like early 2005. I used it easily until like 2012 when I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy 4G.
Can't believe Michael MJD stole my video idea smh. I make a PDA video then 4 weeks later this drops? Can't possibly be a coincidence! (Jokes aside, it's always interesting to see more of these little devices. Feel like they never quite went as far as they could have.)
Your laugh around 18:50 scared the sh-t out of my half asleep buttt. you sounded somewhere between fnaf jumpscare and mouse squeeling when caught in a trap. thanks for waking me up micheal
Thank you for this trip down memory lane. I still own the last generation of the HP Business iPaq as well as a Palm TX (don't get me started on my Newton collection) and one thing that still amazes me is how usable these are. While I know they pale in comparison to the power and versatility of modern smartphones, these were targeted devices. They were not a 'jack of all trades' like modern devices, they were focused on getting business done and being a bridge from mobile work/documents to a PC. Comparing the two platforms however I am amazed at the volume of Palm OS apps that are available and still run on my Palm TX. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my iPaq. What few programs I can find just don't seem to work on my last generation device. Which is unfortunate as I cannot even use the build in email app to check gmail, which would go a long way to making this a fun and production device.
I once had a Linksys WIP330 wifi candybar-shaped VoIP phone that ran Windows CE. It had no functionality except for the phone calling, sort of like a wifi SPA942. I distinctly remember it being horrible at its one job, being a phone. That being said, I had a Compaq Ipaq decked out with a dual pcmcia card sleeve, a 1GB spinning CF card hard drive, etc... I loved that thing. I could not do anything with it because it was useless. But I remember trying to do things with it and an 802.11b card.
I bought one of these exact models when I was in 9th grade. I wanted a laptop, but even the 90s era stuff was too expensive at the time. I bought one of these and a fold-out keyboard instead. I quickly found out it was way more limited than a desktop Windows environment, but I loved it still.
Regarding the phone you showed, the one with the hidden sliding keyboard... I had the same device but it was a different brand. I suspect that the hardware was branded under several companies. Mine came from Bell Canada - it was a CDMA phone. That device was so horrible at being a phone... Calls would drop and it would crash all the time. I remember being so gutted when I realized I wasted over 500 Canadian dollars on a brand new device I could not return (due to air time used) and I would have to use it as my daily driver for the next two years. Thanks for the awesome walkthrough!
That was a *very* good idea to remove the battery, as I had a e330 that the battery expanded to the point that it broke the plastic holding the two halves basically *ripping it apart* and it likely broke the screen before then. I had originally blamed the screen breaking on it being kinda under stuff in its soft case and something potentially hitting it, but I had no idea what and how that impact would've translated to the not-that-soft screen cover portion of the case.
I remember buying a Compaq iPaq Pocket PC PDA back in July of 2000. At that time, I was using Windows 98 second edition on my PC. Also come to think about it is tomorrow will be the 22nd anniversary of Windows ME. Would be nice to do a video of the 22nd anniversary of when Microsoft released Windows ME on September 14th, 2000.
Hey, MJD. I recently picked up at my local thrift store an old HP iPAQ Pocket PC running windows pocket edition version 4.20.0 (build 14053) and it came with a docking cradle, ac adapter, a 512 mb SD card, a battery that i had to force a charge into it to get it to work without the need of external power, (i also ordered a replacement battery for it on ebay) it works great actually! there are still apps and games you can download out there for pocket pc. sure its old but i remember growing up on these devices even when windows CE was on those mini B&W clamshell devices. this version i have is capable of playing music stored on the SD card. i am sure the max supported capacity SD card is 2gb as that was the standard before anything larger like the 4gb+ SDHC cards started coming out. If you are interested let me know.
I wonder how much better Windows Phone would have done in the market if it had a Windows CE wrapper/emulator for legacy enterprise applications included, a bit like cotulla was able to make or unlock after Windows Phone was almost already dead in the water.
I had a Compaq iPAQ 3870. It was AMAZING, I did absolutely everything on that. MSN Messenger, booking all my 2000’s holidays, groceries, etc. ed: also it cost a fucking fortune. ed ed: I was getting online with Bluetooth to my Ericsson T68.
I still have my 2 Mio windows pda's from around 2003. These were very well known since they had build in gps and where used with TomTom software or their own gps software. This was the main reason to buy these apart from games and mails. Synchronisation was done by infrared or usb.
I had a cheap Palm that I barely used for anything, especially since I had gotten an iPod and GBA at some points prior I had literally one game that could run, it barely did, and otherwise it couldn't do anything cuz I didn't have an internet connection til like 12. Ahh, I loved that damn Palm.
Can you imagine writing a ten page word document or an excel spreadsheet with tons of formula’s in that little tiny display with a stylus?! Ouch. Makes doing that on an iPhone look way super easy. The most useful thing I ever did with one of these things was in 2013 scanning hardware IDs and property tags for deploying IU IT equipment.
I have one of these and was wondering if I could put some sort of cfw on this. Just for the hell of it. I can't imagine it being useful afterwards. The real reason I commented though is to say this guy sounds so much like Jeff goldblum if he did asmr tech videos! Great video dude
The stickers reminded me of a fiasco the teachers in my old primary school pulled with the Textbooks.. They glued the answer page in the back to the outer cover.... 😂
Used one as a kid. Dad bought one of the original Pocket PC's with Pocket PC 2000. Was always fascinated with the thing. Sadly I dont think it works anymore. Got it with a couple other slightly newer models laying around that I havent gotten around to playing with for years. Maybe ill break them out and give them a try.
I'd bet that all the system files can't be deleted because they're in a ROM. Even if the battery drains completely, give it power and they're there with everything set to default. I'd like to see someone get Doom working on it, and since I have an old Axim that I used to play with the handwriting recognition on it years ago, I might add that to my project list.
They can't be deleted but curiously enough almost all of them can be "overwritten". Windows CE combines the ROM, RAM and external storage under a single filesystem root so a file in \Windows can exist in ROM or RAM or both simultaneously with priority given to the RAM version. This design made manufacturers lives much easier as they could use different combinations of ROM and RAM in development and production devices.
@@firstsurname9893 Do you mean the whole OS is copied to RAM when it first gets powered on and as long as you have battery or wall power it works from there?
@@anon_y_mousse Actually no, it doesn't need to do that in most circumstances on an end user device. Windows CE supports a technique called XIP (eXecute In Place) which allows non-compressed code to be fetched and executed directly from ROM without being copied into RAM first. Now obviously the OS needs some RAM for things like the registry hive, heap, stack and file decompression but the aim is to keep this usage to a bare minimum because user programs require RAM for their storage and execution. One thing that is very different about WinCE is that the user can define how RAM is divided between object storage (files) and execution space (program memory) because both occupy the same physical memory. The reason I said in most circumstances is because when a device is being developed the minimum requirements are a CPU with 1MiB of SDRAM, a bootloader, a kernel OEM adaptation layer and a kernel independent transport layer. With this minimal hardware and software the rest of the operating system can be written and debugged on a host PC attached to the development board. During development the OS image is uploaded over a cable during the boot process so a ROM is not strictly necessary until the device is ready to be manufactured.
@@firstsurname9893 If it doesn't copy everything to RAM when it first gets power, then how can anything in the ROM be overwritten? Are you talking about bypassing the ROM, a factory connection or did you mean something else entirely?
19:12 The calculator application has additional features judging from the currency icon on the bottom toolbar. Maybe it included a currency converter. Just a recommendation: you can do a video where you sync the PDA to a Windows XP PC using Active Sync
I didn't have this exact model or this specific OS but I did have a PDA which ran CE 3.0 and I thought it was amazing for its time. It's also funny that in this video its mentioned that you wouldn't want to write a five paragraph essay with it. I didn't just write a five paragraph essay with it once, but I wrote a several page short story. Needless to say my hand was in quite a bit of discomfort but I felt like doing it.
My first PDA was a Dell Axim. Despite the MANY limitations I found very good use for it. Got a CF WIFI card for it to connect to my university's WIFI network and downloaded content (email and news articles) for offline viewing during my subway ride. My first smart phone was windows mobile based so it was an easy transition. That said, with it's blisteringly fast always on 2G connection it was a far better experience, except for windows mobile's MANY memory leaks and problems requiring regular reboots, and resetting the whole device about once a week.... The hardware was there, the OS is what held many windows mobile devices back.
It was pretty new and exciting tech back then, a color touchscreen pocket PC with downloadable software onto a CFI memory cartridge. Mine was a HP jornada and carried around with me everywhere. I was 18 back then, an early adopter of the evolution of smartphones. I also owned a Garmin etrex for mobile navigation and a Olympus 3mp digital camera. All common but improved features on smartphones.
the battery switch thingy would be useful on laptops - so that if you use your laptop plugged in it would stop charging the battery fully, and the thing would be demadged slower
I loved windows mobile smartphones. I have had 2002 HTC up until about 2010-2011, it was completely up to date and usable for almost a decade! Well to be fair it was because the CPUs remained the same for such a long time with only networking, camera and displays getting upgraded on newer models so after installing newer windows mobile you could still use all the apps and play all the games.... I love how you could play 1:1 PC ported games on these, I really missed simcity after switching to android. The last time I used that HTC as a real phone was probably about 2015 as the network it used was dropped but until that time it was still working well as a secondary device with opera browser still supporting all the websites.
I had a O2 XDA 2 pocket PC had had phone functionality and it was the best! I was the first person I knew in 2006 to have a smart phone. I sold it to buy an android phone, HTC desire which was also a really good phone. I miss the O2.
I wonder if the website link on the doom port is the original website or if the domain was sold. I say this because I tried the website and it worked, but didn’t quite look like a website from 2002. Definitely interesting, nonetheless. Edit: upon closer inspection, the first sign of DOOM4CE that is archived online is from the October 12, 1999 snapshot on Internet Archive. There was a gap between May 8th and October 12th, however, so it might’ve originated between those dates. I have no way of knowing that, though, so that’s the best I think we’ll be able to get without an account from someone who has firsthand knowledge of this or from Jimmy themself.
Pocket PC devices were pretty powerful. At my work around 2002 my colleague put together a video streaming demo using an iPaq with a PC Card sled and WiFi card. The quality was not great by today's standards but it was impressive to envision a future of watching a show or movie anywhere you happened to be.
The user interface reminds me a lot of the TI-Nspire CX's layout. A lot of the menus, dropdowns, and even the fonts look oddly similar. Guess that illustrates just how dated Texas Instruments' products are compared to anything sold past the 2010s.
The speaker issue has to be either with the Toshiba models, or that one in particular, because the HP iPAQ that I had back then was plenty loud and clear. Also, at the time, I used the IR port along with a Nokia phone that also had an IR port to allow my iPAQ to get online, browse the internet and check my email. Yeah, it was slow, but no worse than dialup at the time, and the combination was FAR cheaper than one of the models with the built in cellular modem.
Gotta love old tech.
There's a certain charm that makes you want one despite they're obsolete
Same. I would love playing Solitaire while waiting to board a plane
I have absolutely no use for it, but i would love to have a Commodore 64 or another system of the same type. They're really cool. Just finding a broken one would make a cool show piece tbh
True, and 100th like.
@@Ferrari255GTO it's just the look and feel of the time that modern rgb filled glass side panel computers will never capture
I have one of these, I play Age of Empires on it. A TON of maps are available for it
This is giving me a glimpse of what the fast-paced business person of the early 2000s life was like. I can smell the coffee, airport business class, client dinners and boardroom meetings already
It's... Not any different lmao
I remember having an iPaq h2215 as a teenager because I was a nerd.
@@SkelitonLord227 Nope, it's much of the same thing with the newest iPhone or Android device....
Most of the people that owned these were nerds with very empty schedules.
Is it just me or did companies go out of business faster back then there where so many huge companies that made one or 2 mistakes and where gone in a few years but todays corporations seem to be able to get away with much more.
My father purchased a pocket pc in my youth, and I remember them being soooooo pricey when he decided to buy one. He bought one, and then the same night we went to a restaurant next to the bestbuy. He opted not to get a warranty, and slipped it in his back pocket just sitting on the soft seat of the truck was enough to crack the screen. He never even got to use it. You can only imagine the anger thru that meal. Not a word was spoken lol
that was the major downfall of those devices back then, because of how the touch screen works, once its cracked its done, you cannot use it at all. anything that uses a stylus for touchscreen purposes is a dual layer screen, you have the glass a very thin gap between then the plastic layer on top. you press on the plastic payer and it determines the position of where it is being touched, and compared to the multi touch we have today, those screens are only capable of one touch input at the same time. take the Nintendo DS line for example. that is a bit more modern look at the technology but still worked the same as these devices, and they are much cheaper to make too.
Yes that exact thing happened. Except I slammed the car door on my sweater. It was horrible ordeal!
I remember i was at a family reunion, and had mine in my cargo pocket in a case. and i was on a playground spinning my little cousins on one of those spinning wheels of death. I jumped on and one of the bars smacked me in the leg and destroyed my iPAQ.
@@fecalfetus7902 then you are cussing at the entire world and feeling like crap for days.
it's funny because smartphones of today are just as fragile lmao
least the screen is still usable after a crack
I never got to use a PDA when they were popular, but I can definitely appreciate the technology! It seemed pretty revolutionary for its time.
I had one as a kid and at one point had 11, salvaged from thrift stores
Yea same here for some reason i thought they where way less advanced i must have been thinking of my very bad experience when someone showed me one from the 1990s with a monochrome screen and the pc syncing would always crash or take forever but these early 2000s versions look like they could have been very fun for me if i had my current levels of knowledge i could download stuff from the internet and then play it back on this thing in school even very low quality multimedia is better than just sitting still looking at clouds until the bus shows up or reading the same book over and over.
I had one as a Teen. Palm Zire 71. Found it in a pawnshop sometime 2005/06. I loved it. Used it as my camera mostly. My PSP served as my main media player at the time, even though the PDA had MP3 capabilities.Just the fact that it had a camera that even recorded video at that time was just awesome at the time for me. Even though it had potato quality. lmao
As a kid I remember being completely mind blown by how such small devices had 'Windows' running on them, I think at my old school just before I left the teachers started using them to take the class registers too which seemed so futuristic at the time - interesting how for the first year or so the iPhone was essentially just a glorified version of these too until the App Store came along and literally changed everything overnight
The first iPhone was a different beast to these: it actually worked. These things were essentially expensive executive toys: they were terribly slow, clunky and limited.
Stop saying essentially
@@HistoryandReviews Please use full stops. Thanks.
@@LitNews I bet you've never used these devices before
these things and palm pilots had tons of apps you could get too
WOW, what a public display of affection for nostalgic 2000s tech, well done!
I see what you did there
AGREED!!! He's got quite the strong PDA for this type of tech.. VERY COMPASSIONATE!!!!!
I remember when early 2000s cartoons had these for characters who were portrayed as "techie." Like Tucker in _Danny Phantom_ who always had his PDA with him, or Wade who invented the glorified PDA that was the Kimmunicator on _Kim Possible._
It was in another Disney show zenon girl of the 21st century first I believe More of a tablet style if my old mind remembers right
That was also a thing in a few kids’ books that I’ve read
Star Fox Adventures features a super futuristic hologram "PDA" 😆
I was lucky enough to work for a company where I could get these dirt cheap back in the day (ex customer returns) I had (and still have) the Toshiba E800 with an ibm micro drive used it for watching AVIs of south park , low bitrate mp3s, internet browsing and emulators and yes doom. They were the days lol
i remember having a PDA back in 2006 just because it was free. and had app called eXPerience on it, which made Windows XP like desktop with start menu
I had a teacher in 4th grade (2004) that knew I collected cellphones. The day he came to my class and gave me his “old” ipaq I nearly shat myself in front of everyone! Went from B&W bar phones and a few B&W flip phones to that thing. Blew my mind what that thing could do!
Having lived through this time as an IT tech, I both understand why these sorts of devices existed and am SO SO SO glad that they died when smartphones appeared.
In a vacuum they worked...fine. But trying to get them to play nice in the most common business computing environments of the time was a nightmare.
The 80s-2000s were fun because almost nothing technology related was standardized. It was always a surprise to see a new, weird, unique device and you were always a early adopter of a device you didn't knew if it will have a upgrade the following year.
Also, some technology had some very good features that today are missing.
I got a Windows CE device in 1999. I'm an engineer who's teaching in China. You can't get on the subway without your smartphone to show your 48 hour PCR test and health code. I keep saying to those peasants at the subway security gate that only early adopters like me having internet connected technology in their pockets. You can't expect normal people to have it because you're all backwards and low-tech in China.
I love reliving these old devices, they bring back so many memories. This channel really does take me back, thanks to you and those gracious enough to donate to the channel so we can relive some of these devices.
Boy oh boy I remember my E755 I had back in the day. Basically this thing only thicker, with wifi, an SD and CF card slot, and a faster processor...with a removable battery that could be replaced with a very large extended battery.
This video just unlocked some memories. I had this exact Pocket PC in middle school- I bought it used for $50 from my dad’s business partner circa 2004-2005. That year for Christmas I got a foldable IR keyboard to work on essays and homework when I was stuck at school late for extra curriculars. (Pretty sure I used it like twice.) I even found a media player app with an iPod skin and a (somewhat) functional touchscreen click wheel. Fun times with that thing. I need to look for it next time I’m at my parents’ house 😂
Oh gosh. My father bought me exactly this one back in 2003 when I was in kindergarten. It was mindblowing. We used to draw some (kinda) cartoons in Paint.exe. It was so laggy, that it loaded layer after layer and it gave an illusion of animation
My dad had one with what looked like windows xp. loved drawing with the stylus. I wish I could remember what model it was though.
Might've actually been windows mobile
A little pocket pc from 2002? Sweet!! Always love seeing you cover this type of tech and all different kinds
damn this brings me back when i used to own a qtek 9100 (later rebranded as a HTC 9100). I loved the windows mobile operating system. i remember that i used to calculate how many apps/games i could install. 2mb apps where concidered HUUUGE you'd rather install apps not bigger then 100kb which is insane if you compare it to app sizes from today.
I bought a Dell Axim back in 2001-2002. I was so excited when I got it. It was during my first real job out of college. My co-workers thought I was a dork for sure. I still have it, all the cables, the original box and manuals. Brings back lots of memories.
I still say anybody who has a smartphone should be a called a dork. Because in the past people were against me for having a pocket computing device. Now they're against me for NOT HAVING a pocket computing device. It's like you must conform or risk being called a dork.
Let’s see Paul Allen’s PDA
Nice I like doom and pdas
I owned that exact device back then. Brings back memories.
I wonder this device how to connect the internet ?
I remember wanting one of these PDAs so hard back then, i found them mesmerizing despite their clear limitations.
Now we've got smartphones that can do much more and better things PDAs could and we take that stuff for granted.
I still have my HP iPAQ HX2490B, and I absolutely miss using it! for the time it was made, it felt like I could do almost anything with it. I even shoehorned Windows Mobile 6.5 on it and ran some pretty useful "apps" on it too.
It was what portable devices were meant to do, be, and what they should have stayed as.
I remember that my dad had a similar PDA than this one (Compaq iPAQ H3975), these were ahead of their times, especially with the touch screen. But the speaker was way better than the one on this video.
I've got a similar one and it still works! The e330 with the charging/sync dock. Used it for years. Such a great device in the pre-iPhone era.
Thank you Ashley! :)
I still think that instead of calling smartphones "smartphones" I think they should have called them PDAs with phone capabilities. Smartphones are basically PDAs with a cell phone app installed. It's kind of weird to call them a phone when it does so much more.
this brings back a lot of memories...
i used to have one WM pda as an electronic dictionary for school and an emulator for games, it run GBA and even PS1 games smoothly !
it was also my MP3 player and video player (had to use another 30 mins to transcode the original 20-min video first, though, LOL)
I ran a genesis emulator at full speed on a phone with the same CPU. I played Phantasy Star 4 all the way through on that thing while on the train. It was weird because my newer phone with a strongARM CPU couldn't run things nearly as well
Possibly your phone's cpu was the weaker model.
I had an Ipaq 2210/2215 400 mhz. I did everything with it. It could play high quality mp3 and a videogame at the same time. I kept looking for the next model at least 600mhz without losing any current features. That never happened, phones got better. But there was still a long wait for those advancements. Then they were here, everywhere.
I had this exact model and bought it close to launch. It didn't have Wifi and was very limited in performance and storage space. I bought a 16MB or 32MB SD card so I could use it mostly as an MP3 player and to play games on the go.
Sold it complete in box in the early 2010s for a great price to some guy who thought he was getting somekind of iPod.
I bought one in 2002. The brand was HP. And I purchased a Palm Pilot for my girlfriend at that time. It was the PDA with a green monochrome display.
This is bringing back dreaded memories of when I started working at Kohl's. Every scanning device we used had a version of Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called from 2009-2016) and they were HORRID. The first device we had wasn't so bad, but it was when we got new devices later on (a total of three through those years), the problems just kept getting worse and worse. They got so bad, in fact, that you couldn't do basic functions without apps crashing all the time and even random reboots. They would also sometimes reset themselves and you had to re-flash the devices to set them back to being usable in the store. All I remember of mobile Windows devices (especially phones) were just about bad the interface was. I'm a Windows user for life, but when it comes to mobile devices, give me iOS or Android any day.
I remember my uncle developing those scanning handheld systems in the year 2000, programming in Windows for some big company, doing com dcom.
Midway through the video I realised, how insanely features filled and blazing fast this thing would have been back then!
👌🏻
Two videos in a week good job Michael!
i bought an ipaq3650 when i was in high school it had ppc2000. i actually worked at a computer store so i got a bit of a deal but it played that version of doom just fine, i bought it mostly for ppc quake which only ran about 8fps lol
I had an HTC xda, loaded with SimCity, Monkey Island and so on. Also came with your obligatory copy of word and excel. Great stuff couldn't be separated from it as a kid
Interesting how they swapped the locations of the Start button and menu bar for mobile (well, not exactly, but you know what I mean, lol)...
WinCE was designed to make it almost seamless learning it. Then Mobile happened.
I remember playing around with a Compaq back in the day. I kinda liked it.
I have a Dell pocket pc, next to the last model in fsct. It was awesome when it was new. Way faster then my older HP media connector I bought in like early 2005. I used it easily until like 2012 when I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy 4G.
i own a Dell Axim X50 and a HTC HD2, windows mobile is so fun to play around with, i just wish we could find MORE games.
Can't believe Michael MJD stole my video idea smh. I make a PDA video then 4 weeks later this drops? Can't possibly be a coincidence!
(Jokes aside, it's always interesting to see more of these little devices. Feel like they never quite went as far as they could have.)
Your laugh around 18:50 scared the sh-t out of my half asleep buttt. you sounded somewhere between fnaf jumpscare and mouse squeeling when caught in a trap. thanks for waking me up micheal
Never expected Pocket PCS to play Doom now
to be fair, everything that has a screen can play doom at this point
Thank you for this trip down memory lane.
I still own the last generation of the HP Business iPaq as well as a Palm TX (don't get me started on my Newton collection) and one thing that still amazes me is how usable these are.
While I know they pale in comparison to the power and versatility of modern smartphones, these were targeted devices. They were not a 'jack of all trades' like modern devices, they were focused on getting business done and being a bridge from mobile work/documents to a PC.
Comparing the two platforms however I am amazed at the volume of Palm OS apps that are available and still run on my Palm TX.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my iPaq. What few programs I can find just don't seem to work on my last generation device. Which is unfortunate as I cannot even use the build in email app to check gmail, which would go a long way to making this a fun and production device.
I once had a Linksys WIP330 wifi candybar-shaped VoIP phone that ran Windows CE. It had no functionality except for the phone calling, sort of like a wifi SPA942. I distinctly remember it being horrible at its one job, being a phone.
That being said, I had a Compaq Ipaq decked out with a dual pcmcia card sleeve, a 1GB spinning CF card hard drive, etc... I loved that thing. I could not do anything with it because it was useless. But I remember trying to do things with it and an 802.11b card.
Somehow i played this video and it was playing in the background but I was lulled by your calming voice
I bought one of these exact models when I was in 9th grade. I wanted a laptop, but even the 90s era stuff was too expensive at the time. I bought one of these and a fold-out keyboard instead. I quickly found out it was way more limited than a desktop Windows environment, but I loved it still.
Today's pocket PC is now a smartphone. It's crazy how tech evolves.
Regarding the phone you showed, the one with the hidden sliding keyboard... I had the same device but it was a different brand. I suspect that the hardware was branded under several companies.
Mine came from Bell Canada - it was a CDMA phone.
That device was so horrible at being a phone... Calls would drop and it would crash all the time. I remember being so gutted when I realized I wasted over 500 Canadian dollars on a brand new device I could not return (due to air time used) and I would have to use it as my daily driver for the next two years.
Thanks for the awesome walkthrough!
That was a *very* good idea to remove the battery, as I had a e330 that the battery expanded to the point that it broke the plastic holding the two halves basically *ripping it apart* and it likely broke the screen before then. I had originally blamed the screen breaking on it being kinda under stuff in its soft case and something potentially hitting it, but I had no idea what and how that impact would've translated to the not-that-soft screen cover portion of the case.
How did you know ive been into pocket pcs lately? Theres not many good videos on them, glad to see one from you
Good Video, Nichael! 😉
I remember buying a Compaq iPaq Pocket PC PDA back in July of 2000. At that time, I was using Windows 98 second edition on my PC. Also come to think about it is tomorrow will be the 22nd anniversary of Windows ME. Would be nice to do a video of the 22nd anniversary of when Microsoft released Windows ME on September 14th, 2000.
OMG windows ppc and ce 6.... THE MEMORIES!!
I was obsessed with these in middle school
Love your content!,
There's no one like you would do this content again!
The WiFi enabled SD cards! I remember having to futz with the crappy driver support... Also compact flash wifi adapters... It was wild and super fun
I ran emulators, movies, music, audio recording, GPS, and much more on my old PDAs in the 2000s.
Hey, MJD.
I recently picked up at my local thrift store an old HP iPAQ Pocket PC running windows pocket edition version 4.20.0 (build 14053) and it came with a docking cradle, ac adapter, a 512 mb SD card, a battery that i had to force a charge into it to get it to work without the need of external power, (i also ordered a replacement battery for it on ebay) it works great actually!
there are still apps and games you can download out there for pocket pc. sure its old but i remember growing up on these devices even when windows CE was on those mini B&W clamshell devices.
this version i have is capable of playing music stored on the SD card. i am sure the max supported capacity SD card is 2gb as that was the standard before anything larger like the 4gb+ SDHC cards started coming out.
If you are interested let me know.
I wonder how much better Windows Phone would have done in the market if it had a Windows CE wrapper/emulator for legacy enterprise applications included, a bit like cotulla was able to make or unlock after Windows Phone was almost already dead in the water.
I had a Compaq iPAQ 3870. It was AMAZING, I did absolutely everything on that. MSN Messenger, booking all my 2000’s holidays, groceries, etc.
ed: also it cost a fucking fortune.
ed ed: I was getting online with Bluetooth to my Ericsson T68.
I still have my 2 Mio windows pda's from around 2003. These were very well known since they had build in gps and where used with TomTom software or their own gps software. This was the main reason to buy these apart from games and mails. Synchronisation was done by infrared or usb.
I had a cheap Palm that I barely used for anything, especially since I had gotten an iPod and GBA at some points prior
I had literally one game that could run, it barely did, and otherwise it couldn't do anything cuz I didn't have an internet connection til like 12.
Ahh, I loved that damn Palm.
Can you imagine writing a ten page word document or an excel spreadsheet with tons of formula’s in that little tiny display with a stylus?! Ouch. Makes doing that on an iPhone look way super easy. The most useful thing I ever did with one of these things was in 2013 scanning hardware IDs and property tags for deploying IU IT equipment.
Seen the Pocket PC version of Doom at Comp USA way back when, always wondered how it played.
the battery cutoff was for going on an airplane. restrictions required you to be able to fully turn off the electronics you have with you.
I have one of these and was wondering if I could put some sort of cfw on this. Just for the hell of it. I can't imagine it being useful afterwards. The real reason I commented though is to say this guy sounds so much like Jeff goldblum if he did asmr tech videos!
Great video dude
The stickers reminded me of a fiasco the teachers in my old primary school pulled with the Textbooks..
They glued the answer page in the back to the outer cover.... 😂
I can see this being an amazing tool back in 2002
This Video: * exists *
Me: Eh, I will watch it later!
This Video: ...ft. DOOM...
Me: I am watching this now!
My first phone was an HTC Touch so Windows Mobile brings back some fond, if totally buggy memories. I got so damned good at Bubble Breaker.
Used one as a kid. Dad bought one of the original Pocket PC's with Pocket PC 2000. Was always fascinated with the thing.
Sadly I dont think it works anymore. Got it with a couple other slightly newer models laying around that I havent gotten around to playing with for years. Maybe ill break them out and give them a try.
Omg. This video remind me that I used to own Toshiba E740. I even bought adapter so my pda can directly connect to vga projector.
I'd bet that all the system files can't be deleted because they're in a ROM. Even if the battery drains completely, give it power and they're there with everything set to default. I'd like to see someone get Doom working on it, and since I have an old Axim that I used to play with the handwriting recognition on it years ago, I might add that to my project list.
Yes, this is how they worked. Flash memory was expensive, so the ROM contained system files. Early Windows CE essentially used RAM disk
They can't be deleted but curiously enough almost all of them can be "overwritten".
Windows CE combines the ROM, RAM and external storage under a single filesystem root so a file in \Windows can exist in ROM or RAM or both simultaneously with priority given to the RAM version. This design made manufacturers lives much easier as they could use different combinations of ROM and RAM in development and production devices.
@@firstsurname9893 Do you mean the whole OS is copied to RAM when it first gets powered on and as long as you have battery or wall power it works from there?
@@anon_y_mousse Actually no, it doesn't need to do that in most circumstances on an end user device.
Windows CE supports a technique called XIP (eXecute In Place) which allows non-compressed code to be fetched and executed directly from ROM without being copied into RAM first. Now obviously the OS needs some RAM for things like the registry hive, heap, stack and file decompression but the aim is to keep this usage to a bare minimum because user programs require RAM for their storage and execution. One thing that is very different about WinCE is that the user can define how RAM is divided between object storage (files) and execution space (program memory) because both occupy the same physical memory.
The reason I said in most circumstances is because when a device is being developed the minimum requirements are a CPU with 1MiB of SDRAM, a bootloader, a kernel OEM adaptation layer and a kernel independent transport layer. With this minimal hardware and software the rest of the operating system can be written and debugged on a host PC attached to the development board. During development the OS image is uploaded over a cable during the boot process so a ROM is not strictly necessary until the device is ready to be manufactured.
@@firstsurname9893 If it doesn't copy everything to RAM when it first gets power, then how can anything in the ROM be overwritten? Are you talking about bypassing the ROM, a factory connection or did you mean something else entirely?
Time travel got here faster than I thought it would!
19:12 The calculator application has additional features judging from the currency icon on the bottom toolbar. Maybe it included a currency converter.
Just a recommendation: you can do a video where you sync the PDA to a Windows XP PC using Active Sync
Yet another great video from my favourite TH-camr nichael ntd!
Biggest flex in early 2000's
To recognize an 'm' in transcribe, I think you had to start with a down-stroke and then continue with the two arches.
I didn't have this exact model or this specific OS but I did have a PDA which ran CE 3.0 and I thought it was amazing for its time. It's also funny that in this video its mentioned that you wouldn't want to write a five paragraph essay with it. I didn't just write a five paragraph essay with it once, but I wrote a several page short story. Needless to say my hand was in quite a bit of discomfort but I felt like doing it.
I had one in 'High school' now i feel old, thanks!
Edit: I had a foldable keyboard dock for mine that used the IRDA to send keystrokes to it.
I still remember when I switched from my old Windows CE PDA to a Windows Pocket one with color screen.
i had one of these as a teen because dad's work was obsoleting their old hardware and i played SO MUCH jawbreaker
My first PDA was a Dell Axim. Despite the MANY limitations I found very good use for it. Got a CF WIFI card for it to connect to my university's WIFI network and downloaded content (email and news articles) for offline viewing during my subway ride. My first smart phone was windows mobile based so it was an easy transition. That said, with it's blisteringly fast always on 2G connection it was a far better experience, except for windows mobile's MANY memory leaks and problems requiring regular reboots, and resetting the whole device about once a week....
The hardware was there, the OS is what held many windows mobile devices back.
I had one of these back in the day. All my office mates had Palms but I really preferred Pocket PC.
It was pretty new and exciting tech back then, a color touchscreen pocket PC with downloadable software onto a CFI memory cartridge. Mine was a HP jornada and carried around with me everywhere. I was 18 back then, an early adopter of the evolution of smartphones. I also owned a Garmin etrex for mobile navigation and a Olympus 3mp digital camera. All common but improved features on smartphones.
the battery switch thingy would be useful on laptops - so that if you use your laptop plugged in it would stop charging the battery fully, and the thing would be demadged slower
I loved windows mobile smartphones. I have had 2002 HTC up until about 2010-2011, it was completely up to date and usable for almost a decade! Well to be fair it was because the CPUs remained the same for such a long time with only networking, camera and displays getting upgraded on newer models so after installing newer windows mobile you could still use all the apps and play all the games.... I love how you could play 1:1 PC ported games on these, I really missed simcity after switching to android.
The last time I used that HTC as a real phone was probably about 2015 as the network it used was dropped but until that time it was still working well as a secondary device with opera browser still supporting all the websites.
I had a O2 XDA 2 pocket PC had had phone functionality and it was the best! I was the first person I knew in 2006 to have a smart phone. I sold it to buy an android phone, HTC desire which was also a really good phone. I miss the O2.
I wonder if the website link on the doom port is the original website or if the domain was sold. I say this because I tried the website and it worked, but didn’t quite look like a website from 2002. Definitely interesting, nonetheless.
Edit: upon closer inspection, the first sign of DOOM4CE that is archived online is from the October 12, 1999 snapshot on Internet Archive. There was a gap between May 8th and October 12th, however, so it might’ve originated between those dates. I have no way of knowing that, though, so that’s the best I think we’ll be able to get without an account from someone who has firsthand knowledge of this or from Jimmy themself.
Pocket PC devices were pretty powerful. At my work around 2002 my colleague put together a video streaming demo using an iPaq with a PC Card sled and WiFi card. The quality was not great by today's standards but it was impressive to envision a future of watching a show or movie anywhere you happened to be.
The user interface reminds me a lot of the TI-Nspire CX's layout. A lot of the menus, dropdowns, and even the fonts look oddly similar. Guess that illustrates just how dated Texas Instruments' products are compared to anything sold past the 2010s.
We need an episode of you trying to get a "M" on this thing
Awesome video, Michael!
Wow 5 years and we’ve got another Michael videos about Pocket PC
The speaker issue has to be either with the Toshiba models, or that one in particular, because the HP iPAQ that I had back then was plenty loud and clear. Also, at the time, I used the IR port along with a Nokia phone that also had an IR port to allow my iPAQ to get online, browse the internet and check my email. Yeah, it was slow, but no worse than dialup at the time, and the combination was FAR cheaper than one of the models with the built in cellular modem.
I seem to recall the switch to "Windows Mobile" was in 2005, not 2003. (Sorry to be a nitpick 😉)
Great video btw!
Windows is such a dominating company of our computers today.
Seeing them try new things and being coropate like is just... Woah.
These PDAs are my favorites. I have also an Asus A716 and A620