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just_jeepin
12-14-2004, 07:23 PM
I'm a mac Palm user thinking about switching to PPC but had a few questions...

1. Is there a FREE app to allow you to have photos of your contacts?

2. Can PocketIE open raw html files? So I can just download a website and images and read later.

3. I've heard people say that Docs2Go for palm is better that PocketWord and Excel. What is bad about PocketWord and Excel?

4. I've also heard that Adobe Reader for PPC opens pdfs natively (no conversion on the desktop first). Is this true?

5. On palm some apps must be ran in internal ram instead of storage card. Can the PPC run apps directly from the storage card?

Thanks for any help!
Danny

ADBrown
12-14-2004, 07:50 PM
2. Can PocketIE open raw html files? So I can just download a website and images and read later.

Yes.

3. I've heard people say that Docs2Go for palm is better that PocketWord and Excel. What is bad about PocketWord and Excel?

PocketWord loses some formatting in Word documents, such as headers, footers, images, that sort of thing. PocketExcel has similar problems with lacking some advanced functions. You can get third-party programs which are better, but they don't come bundled.

4. I've also heard that Adobe Reader for PPC opens pdfs natively (no conversion on the desktop first). Is this true?

Yes. PocketPCs don't require conversion or sync conduits to read files, they operate much like a desktop.

5. On palm some apps must be ran in internal ram instead of storage card. Can the PPC run apps directly from the storage card?


Yes, except for a very limited few kinds of programs that insist on being installed to RAM. Mostly drivers.

emuelle1
12-14-2004, 07:53 PM
Greetings. I'll take a crack at your questions.

1)Yes. I know I've seen it on Freewareppc.com

2)You could save .html if you want. You can also create a custom channel in Avantgo for pages that you'd like to make sure you sync frequently.

3) Not sure. Pocket Word is pretty good, and Pocket Excel is a very capable spreadsheet considering the small screen. I've lost no formatting from my desktop.

4) You can save .pdf's directly to your Pocket PC and open then in Adobe. Acrobat 2.0 for the Pocket PC has the reflow down really well, so even two column newsletters display in a logical and readable format.

5) You can install directly to the storage card. There are a few programmers who don't like to give that option, but many features can be installed and run from storage.

Hope that helps.

Kati Compton
12-14-2004, 08:14 PM
For PDFs, there are tools to make them smaller and faster, though, as Acrobat is a bit of a hog on any platform. ;) I got Repligo recently and it's muuuch faster. But yes, you can view PDFs directly if you really want.

As for loading into RAM vs. storage card, one basic guideline is that a today-screen plugin should be installed to RAM, everything else you can assume a storage card unless specifically told otherwise. If it doesn't work, then you can try RAM. Right now I'm still putting my "critical" standalone apps into RAM just in case it makes them run a half-second faster. But it's probably not necessary. I've heard TextMaker (the 3rd party Word replacement) is much faster in RAM. Plus anything that writes a lot back to a file in its program directory would be faster in RAM. So when I'm playing a word game I have and add something to the dictionary, it's really slow on the card.