What's with the scarcity of freeware for Pocket PC

[topher]

Greetings all,

I'm a longtime Palm user (ewww... the Dark Side). I recently bought a Casio Cassiopeia EG-800STD (industrial... lets me drop it from time to time, as I'm prone to doing).

I love the new device and OS, but I gotta say, where the heck are the freeware apps?! It seems every app available for this platform is a shareware demo that expires after a time limit! That was one of the great things about the Palm--plenty of freeware apps.

Now don't get me wrong, I'll pay for excellent software... but hey, am I alone in this observation? I paid enough for the damn computer!

I know, I know... stop bitchin' and write some apps myself. :)

[lar3ry]

I love the new device and OS, but I gotta say, where the heck are the freeware apps?!

(I hope this isn't just a troll [smile!])

There are lots of freeware apps for PocketPC platform.

Try http://www.ipaqsoft.net/php/freeware.php as a starting point.

[MBurch]

Try this site...hundreds of apps, many of them freeware:
www.pocketpcfreewares.com

They recently changed servers... you may have to use this URL
http://ppcf.mklabs.com/index.php

It is a French site, so if your "par-lay vu" is as bad as mine, run it through
www.google.com for translation.

I check it on a regular basis. Adds new apps every few days or so.

[Chubbergott]

I rember reading in the NGs about a chappie who has written hundreds of CEBeans.

He was very much ridiculed by the ignorant, but I thought that what he made may look simple but much of it was not at all bad.

[phr0ze]

I remember those CEBeans. Although I like the Idea, they just weren't complete enough to be of value. A lot of his programs were the same program with different colors and a different name.

Hmmm. Why programmers want things as shareware? I'd say mostly to pay for the toys they program on. I hate things that expire though. I'd say good shareware should be solid functional software with advanced features turned off.

[torgamm]

Try this site...hundreds of apps, many of them freeware:
www.pocketpcfreewares.com
They recently changed servers... you may have to use this URL
http://ppcf.mklabs.com/index.php
It is a French site, so if your "par-lay vu" is as bad as mine, run it through
www.google.com for translation.

I check it on a regular basis. Adds new apps every few days or so.

Thanks for this post.
At the moment we have nearly 450 freewares in our database (without any Today themes)
We changed server but domain name is still the same (registrar is still the old one) so you should be able to go on with:
http://www.pocketpcfreewares.com or http://www.pocketpcfreeware.com

Our team is composed by 10 members who feel a genuine passion for this platform.
Our main objective is to help small individual developpers to be known and present their work on a pleasant site.
The site has been online for 10 months and while it began as a sort of personal site, it is now a reference in France and is visited by nearly 3000 unique visitors every day: we are victims of our success and cannot afford it.
We have been working on a multilingual version of our site as we know from our statistics that many visitors use automatic translation. In the January issue of Pocket PC Magazine, Jim Karpen wrote a column about us and encouraged his readers to do so.

Why am I explaining this?
Because we are in front of a big hosting problem. We like to offer a great service to the Pocket PC community but we are not ready to pay large amounts for this.
As the site is dedicated to freeware, it is very difficult to find support.
Software editors (besides of the OS) are not very interested in supporting us because we help concurrents to be known.
We already have a great part of the site translated into english, german and portuguese. But we cannot put it online...
We would like very much to continue this adventure and have a worldwide audience. Our database is ready to accept reviews in any european language.

[Steven Cedrone]

CE Beans, its been a long time since I've heard that!!!

Although I like the Idea, they just weren't complete enough to be of value.

Agreed......

It was Vincent Collura (he took a beating because he announced new apps every day on the Pocket PC newsgroup).

Anyway, his "beans" can be accessed at:

http://www.cebeans.com/