Using a Windows Mobile 2003 PDA (HP iPAQ h4350) in 2022, including WhatsApp | Hacker News Reader

Using a Windows Mobile 2003 PDA (HP iPAQ h4350) in 2022, including WhatsApp

raymii.org

53 pointstodsacerdoti7 comments

> One other thing I like a lot is that there is no tracking and no advertisements. Modern apps are infested with trackers and ads, requiring adblockers, but this old device just has none. Wonderful.

Indeed everything on this device (and pre-2010s computing in general) feels like it was designed to be a tool to serve its user rather than a distraction machine designed to waste the user's time. I miss those times.

the platform had its share of nag screens in all the shareware that was available but the memory and evidence for this died out since the software ecosystem is mostly dead except for what people uploaded to archive.org

EDIT: One of my ideas possibly side projects is to resurrect the WinCE 6.5 platform and build applications for it. Unfortunately the WinCE dev tools are not available anymore. But it is the best minimum viable smart phone platform: touchscreen, camera, external storage through SD/CF cards, audio/video recorder, music player, PIM installed, wireless (IrDA/wifi/etc), GPS, input from soft keyboard/local handwriting recognition, and built in terminal/file manager.

I don't consider shareware a bad thing. If you accept the idea of paid, proprietary software, I think shareware is probably one of the best models out there. It's better than demanding outright payment as it allows you to test-drive the software beforehand and for free occasional usage and it's more sustainable than outright free (as in beer) software since developers need to make a living.

Shareware from back in the day nagged you to buy their software but once you did so they left you alone and the relationship between the developer and the user was still a friendly one with the incentives being aligned (the dev wants you to keep using the software and ideally get others to do so), so past the initial nag the software was generally trying to be as efficient as possible and not intentionally waste the user's time.

Nowadays, not only is there no way to pay to opt-out from the nagging but the advertising cancer has now contaminated a big part of the IT industry where entire products are build not with the objective to solve user's problems and get paid doing so but to provide an unefficient, half-baked solution to the problem as bait to get users to see ads and generate "engagement".

I remember the shareware banners and popups that would give a time delay to use based on a 10 or 15 second counter and software that would say, "<X> number of uses left. Hope you are enjoying the trial." For a while demo software and shareware software was indistinguishable on the WinCE platform. Palm OS slightly had that problem but not to the extent of WinCE.

There used to be very interesting development for the wince platform with porting of typical unix applications like emacs[1]. There used to be improvements to the wince launcher from ROM's on xda-developers, but the bit lockers storage have all expired. Doing development is probably not possible since Microsoft's links for the emulators and Visual Studio 2005 have expired. But it is still possible using Free Pascal[2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010904215400/http://www.rainer...

[2] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Windows_CE_Interface

The problem with using the camera and video hardware on these old devices is that they are just so slow to load up. Funny that the wifi connectivity and especially the IrDA port would outlast the 2G and 3G for support. I'll have to boot it up to very that the GPS works with CDMA (HTC TyTN II).

For using the keyboard and the general size being about a bar of soap it is easier to hold in the hand.

For getting more applications on the device there is yocto, but the hardware is the problem. Best to stick with wince.

[3] https://www.yoctoproject.org/

Even the worst of the old PDAs were better in many ways than smartphones. Once you get all your chats onto XMPP (or WhatsApp in this case) you can jump between OSes and tolerate unavailability much better, then you can easily try weird stuff like this.

Cellular is also a bit overrated unless you live in the exurbs/woods IMO. WiFi is ubiquitous now.

This is inspiring. I recently went to check if they still sold spare batteries for an old Windows Mobile Pocket PC that I owned, and they do! However I know that even if I managed to fix the dead battery, its "smart" capabilities probably wouldn't be that useful today, despite how awesome it would look like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com