Pocket PC. Your Pocket Butler.

These days smartphones have touch screens you can scribble on and keyboards you can type on, both physical and virtual. Phones have voice recorders, video recorders, radios, compasses, front and back facing cameras.

This page was first written when the nearest thing to a smartphone was a pda or Personal Digital Assistant. The PDA had no phone. It had no camera. All the same, at the time the Pocket PC seemed pretty wonderful.

Pocket PCs are still going - well, if not perhaps going strong, still going.

The PDA did and does have some tools like handwriting recognition that smartphones now do not have.

My Pocket PC stylus was also easier and more pen-like to use than a finger or the spongy tip of a stylus for the touch screens of today.

I enthused as follows over the PDA's main app, Pocket PC Notes:

POCKET JEEVES

Pocket Notes for your Pocket PC is amazingly obliging. It accepts almost any input you can throw at it.

SPEECH with Voice Recorder.

BUTTON PRESSES for navigation.

TAP TYPING on the screen.

TOUCH TYPING from a folding keyboard.

LETTERING in Character Recogniser.

One-time Palm user. Cartoon.

GRAFFITI If you're homesick for the Palm, you can use Palm Graffiti.

HANDWRITING from Transcriber.

SCRIBBLES Pocket Notes has its own recognition engine.

Unlike Transcriber, Pocket Notes does not automatically turn your handwriting into type as you go along. You have to tap 'Tools - Recognise'. This looks like a nuisance, but actually it's a big advantage.

SCRAWLS. Sometimes even this genius of the notepad world would have a hard job recognising a hasty jotting. But you don't have to waste time fiddling about. You can leave your writing as it is and convert it to text later on. (If you have Transcriber or Calligrapher installed on your pocket pc, set it to write in colour. Then you will know which recognition engine you're currently using.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HEIROGLYPHICS, MORSE CODE, EMAILS IN WELSH...

In fact you need never ask Notes to 'Recognise' your entry. This means you can scribble any kind of script you care to name. It's saved just as it is.

You could speed up your entries with SHORTHAND.

You could send a HAND WRITTEN GREETING to a friend in any alphabet. All they would need would be desktop Word to open your letter and read it as a graphic, just as you wrote it.

EMAIL? Yes. Your pocket butler delivers your notes to the post. (Tap 'Tools', 'Send via E-mail...'.)

INFRA RED AND/OR BLUETOOTH. Other nearby Pocket Windows users can beam you information.

DIAGRAMS - MIND MAPS - CARTOONS

You can also draw with the stylus.

Note that'drawing' is not the same thing as entering an unsupported set of symbols and leaving them unrecognised. (See above.) It's yet another toolbox of possibilities.

MODELLING. Pocket PC Notes contains quite a powerful little vector drawing programme. You can not only doodle. If you don't like what you've drawn, you can push, pull and remould the shapes until you get them right.

POCKET PC
Your Pocket Butler

Pocket Notes - clever and free with your pocket pc

POCKET PC Your Pocket Butler

Pocket Notes - clever and free with your pocket pc

POCKET PC
Your Pocket Butler