Writing is on the wall for a beloved device former known as the Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile 2003 device). I hate to say it, but I feel I have to. After a seven year love affair with Windows CE I have finally decided that a hand-held device isn’t for me anymore. What’s worse is that my iPaq 1940 is only about three months old and I still believe that it’s the best Pocket PC out there…

I’ve been with Windows CE since its launch in 1996. Actually, I was coding for it before its release to the public – I was working for an unknown shareware company turned mobile software company at the time – and I’ve been a user of hand-held devices ever since. I was never much a fan of the Handheld PC devices – too big for my liking – and was giddy when I first met the Palm-sized PC. While they were still sorta big – especially when compared to then luscious Palm V – they had color, touch screens, blah blah blah.

Shortly after the launch of the Palm-sized PC things heated up further when Microsoft launched the Pocket PC OS. Built on Windows CE but this version had a new UI with different controls being used: instead of looking like a Handheld PC in a tiny case it was now going head to head with Palm.

They won. It was just a matter of time – Palm has helped them win by fucking themselves up whenever possible – so why am I dumping my Pocket PC (PPC)? After all I’ve carried at least one PPC for the last four years.

When the iPaq 1910 came out, I was excited about it because it was small, like tiny-PDA-sized small, but it skimped on a few features: no WiFi, no BlueTooth, no Compact Flash card. It had the best screen I had ever seen on a PPC up to that point but it was just a PDA with an MP3 player and SD card slot. I had already bought my iPod so this was a back up MP3 player, but I still had to think about the lack of hardware features.

I did some Geek-soul searching and realized that I use my PPC for 3.75 things: Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Games (when I finished books in mid-train ride so .5) and MP3 playing (when I forgot to charge my iPod .25). Sounds like I needed a PDA, not a Pocket PC. Right around this time I was also on a Mac kick and when I realized that I wasn’t doing anything that was PPC specific, I almost went and got a Palm device, since Apple liked Palm more than it liked PPC. Anyway, when I finally saw the iPaq 1910 I was instantly sold on it – missing features be damned – and that was that.

See? Big time fan of the platform. And then I met the SmartPhone 2002 edition that lives inside my Motorola MPx200. I think of it as PPC-Lite, which it mostly is, but I recently did another dip into the Geek-soul searching well and found that I haven’t used my PPC to do anything in the last month. Except charge it. Hard resets suck. But that’s it.

For years people have been trying to sync their Outlook Contacts list with their phones – I never wanted this. I have about 90 contacts on my home PC – I have about 40 numbers on my phone – and only about 17 of these two lists overlap. So when I got my phone I made the 40 numbers be “Mobile Only” and was that. When I really looked at my Contacts in Outlook I realized that of the 90 only 20 had phone numbers attached to them – the rest are E-mail. So I made a new “Personal Mobile” category and now those also live on the phone. My Calendar was already sync’ing over so that wasn’t a worry. With Tasks+ I have a usable Task manager too. Oh yeah, the phone has games and MP3 playback too.

So why would I continue to carry an extra device? Yeah, I didn’t have an answer for that either. A better question is how long with the PPC continue to live on unless the phone edition of that takes off.

Personally I’d like having a smaller phone with almost as many features tucked in there!