Pocket PC Nostalgia

Cleaning out a drawer, and look what I found. The old HTC XV6700 (Verizon version) of the Pocket PC. Slide out keyboard, stylus, dedicated Internet Explorer (RIP) key, user swappable battery and a mighty 1.3 MP camera. Circa 2007.
HTC Apache - Wikipedia

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It was a chunk, but I really liked this device - even though it (.875 in) was thicker than the Z Fold 4 (.62 in).

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THAT THING WAS AMAZING! I miss it so much!

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Like @Eltos I really miss mine (it was actually HTC branded on Cingular back then). It’s also an indictment of how much of a wuss and snob I have become, because I was proud of carrying that soap bar in my pocket, but now turn up my nose at the Fold4 which is a full quarter inch slimmer…

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Yes but comparing it to the candy bar smartphones now it is a chunky boy,

Yes. But there was nothing else available that was much thinner. We have a lot more options today. I had an Ipaq, with an SD card reader/writer built into the flap of the leather case and I used a fold up Ipaq keyboard. I still have it all, but I can’t find the power cord for the IPaq. It was quite thick as well.

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Same for this - except that even if we did, the radios are probably obsolete.

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Oh man! The iPaq from Compaq! I won mine at a conference. It was SO good at the time. I could ssh into servers with it.

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I don’t think they were even 3g, were they? Yes, we now have thinner, lighter, more powerful, and frankly far better solution, but the question I’m struggling with is why I’m NOT using those instead of waiting for the next great thing -

No, this was a chonker though I still loved it. It also had it’s own issues with the battery getting very hot if it was dropped/damaged. One engineer I worked with actually has a scar on his leg from where his overheated in his pocket !

BlackBerry 850 | IT History Society

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Oh man, this was my foray into pocket pc ish ness in 2007. Wasn’t quite as robust as some others, but pretty capable compared to most other devices of the time.

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I just found an old review of the Helio Ocean, and one person’s comments were great. They said they were sure the Ocean would do much better than the upcoming iPhone, because people like tactile touch, and the iPhone was really just an iPod, even though the larger screen was nicer…

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I had a Samasung Saga.
I actually liked it better than the type on the screen modern phones.
I don’t know ifit counts as a pocket PC, it had Windows mobile on it

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I remember back in the day waiting for the latest release of an HTC sliding phone and not even considering the bland looking Samsung phones.

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Looking back at it, I just can’t believe how wrong I was about Windows Mobile being better and will last longer than the iPhone.

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You weren’t wrong about Windows Phone’s superior interface, etc. We were all victims of Ballmer’s arrogance against Jobs’ marketing ability.

Apparently, feng shui beats technical capability with large general audiences.

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So to get my biases out front on this topic, I’ve been a personal iPhone users since the very first one on release day.

OTOH several of my employers fought tooth and nail against anything with a fruit logo and thus I used multiple iterations of both Blackberry and Windows Phone and even its predecessor Mobile.

As a business phone I thought BlackBerry for a long time was the premier productivity tools while they always lagged Apple and got progressively farther behind in personal/casual use.

And Windows phone was for awhile a decent middle ground and live tiles IMHO is one of the most innovative ideas MS has had, period.

But my developer peers tell me where MS really fell down and at least early on Apple excelled was in making it easier to develop apps for. People may not know this but at the time if you had an apple rep in your city, they were more than happy to conduct an impromptu IOS app basics course for your high school, your user group or your local better business group.

That alone probably won many converts early on.

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I always previously thought that Apple’s advantage was using an iTunes style distribution method for apps, versus whatever ineffective method MS trotted out.

Which was no method. They let third-party app store nobleman manage that portion of their app kingdom. Handango and PocketGear among numerous others were the ruling app stores. Apple entered the scene with the strategy to centralize and put all the power in the king’s treasury, their first-party app store, which went on to be their biggest moneymaker yet. Their worst fears however are being realized since the EU is on the cusp of requiring them to allow unrestricted third-party app installs. Such a move will open the floodgates for another generation of Handango and PocketGear-like third-party app vendors.

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Perspective is my blind spot. I carried the AT&T (actually Cingular) version for nearly a year and thought I had a soap bar in my pocket - hard to imagine I thought the Z Fold 4 is a brick and it is 25% thinner!

Oops - sorry - I’m basically repeating myself from above, but still PO’d at my lack of perspective…

“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”

― Oscar Wilde

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