Tips & Tricks

BASIC Tips

Try free demo software before you buy

Over 90% of all commercial third-party software available for the Pocket PC and Smartphone is offered as a free demo. You can download and install the software for free to see if you like the program. Demo copies are usually full versions of the program that will work a number of times or a number of days. For example, you might download a demo that will work for 15 days—long enough for you to test the program to see if you like it. If you're interested in a program, we strongly suggest you download and test the demo version first, not only to see if you like it, but to make sure it works properly on your Pocket PC or Smartphone.

Conserve power: Set automatic off and screen dim as low as you can tolerate.

By default, your Pocket PC is set up to turn the device off after three minutes. You can change that to 1, 2, 4, or 5 minutes in the Advanced tab of the Power setup screen (Start>Settings>System>Power: see Fig. 1), but we suggest leaving it set to 3 or 2 minutes. If you set it to 1 minute, you may find that your Pocket PC shuts off on you in the middle of a task, when you pause for a moment to think about what you are going to do next.

Fig. 1: Use the Power setup utility to change the amount of time the Pocket PC will remain on before automatically shutting off.

In general, the quicker the power is turned off when you're not using the device, the longer your battery will last. If you're finished using your Pocket PC, don't wait for it to turn itself off automatically. Go ahead and press the "off" button.

Remember, pressing the "off" button on a Pocket PC is not the same as turning off a desktop PC. On a Pocket PC, pressing "off" shuts off the power to the display and causes the CPU to go into low-power mode. Any application you have opened is still running in low-power mode, and open documents are still there. For example, if you have a document open in Word Mobile when you press "off" it's still there when you press "on."

The Pocket PC also lets you set the screen brightness to dim after 15 or 30 seconds, or 1, 2, 5, or 15 minutes. To set this, go to Battery Power tab in the Brightness setup screen (Start>Settings>Brightness: see Fig. 2). We suggest you set this to as low as you can tolerate to conserve battery power. You'll have to experiment to see what that is. At the very least, it should be set to less than the automatic power off setting. When your screen dims, all you have to do is tap on it with your stylus to un-dim it.

Fig. 2: Change the amount of time for the Pocket PC dims its screen from the Battery Power tab in the Brightness setup utility.

Finally, you can reduce the general brightness level of your display to conserve power. This is done from the first tab in the Brightness setup screen. Again, you'll have to experiment with this setting to discover the lowest tolerable brightness level.

Hard reset erases all data on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices!

The new Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system incorporates "persistent storage," which means that all data and user-installed programs are stored in the non-volatile flash ROM of the Pocket PC or Smartphone. The benefit of this approach is that the data and files stored there remain safe, even if the battery that powers your device runs completely out of power. This was not the case with devices running earlier versions of the OS. By default, data was stored in RAM, which had to have a small amount of energy running through it to remain "alive." If the batteries died, so did your data.