Honeywell (Hand Held Products) has announced the availability of the Dolphin 7600 with GSM.  This also upgrades the Dolphin 7600 to Window Mobile 6.  We are pleased that the ITScriptNet OMNI client and several Ready-To-Go^TM Applications are pre-loaded on the 7600 to give users a good out-of-the-box experience.

Microsoft has released a new update to the Windows Live Search program for Windows Mobile.  Interesting new features include:

• Localised Weather
• Web search from inside the program
• More Traffic coverage.
• Map contacts

We've discussed Live Search before here and here.

The Datalogic Pegaso is now available with Windows Mobile 6 and E-GPRS capabilities.  Previously, the Pegaso was only available with Windows CE 5.0.  Our Falcon 4410 Windows Mobile client should run on this device, but we will get one in to test.

We've run into an issue with Code 93 barcodes on Motorola / Symbol devices.  By default, Code 93 is not enabled on these devices.  To enable it, you must use the Advanced Symbology Settings.  The interesting issue is that enabling both Code93 and EAN/UCC Composite causes the device to accept all symbologies instead of just those two.

Honeywell is purchasing Metrologic, adding to the purchase of Hand Held Products.  It's too early to know how the two groups will be integrated, if at all.  Metrologic makes a line of hand held scanners, and a few mobile computers.  Only one is Windows CE based, the SP5700.

At the Embedded Systems Conference today, Microsoft announced plans to rename Windows CE along with other products.  The new name for Windows CE, starting with what would have been CE 7, will be Windows Embedded Compact.  This release is scheduled for 2009.

The April 2008 ITScriptNet Product and Sales Training is underway in Orlando.  If you were unable to attend, we will post links to the training materials in the next few days.

We've been informed that a firmware update is available for the Symbol MC35 that upgrades it to Windows Mobile 6.  Note that there is a fee for upgrading from Windows Mobile 5 to 6.  Contact your Symbol Rep for more detail.  We'll upgrade our device to make sure that the Windows Mobile 5 client for ITScriptNet continues to work.

Do you remember when we mentioned that the US Census Bereau was using a Windows Mobile device for collecting the 2010 census data?  Well it turns out the project has not gone well, and will be scrapped.  Its too bad - its an interesting application with biometrics, wireless communication, etc.

Today at CTIA, Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.1.  This version is still built on top of Windows CE 5.0, not CE 6.0.  As far as we can tell, the primary update is improvement in integration with System Center Mobile Device Manager.  There doesn't seem to be much that will matter for data collection devices.

We've discussed Windows Mobile 6.1 before.

Where have we been?  If you've noticed the lack of postings over the last few weeks, we've been hard at work on something new which will be announced at our Training Session in a few weeks.

Here are a few news items of interest that we've collected.

Motorola to split
Motorola has announced that they are splitting their handset business from the rest of the company.  We assume that the former Symbol Technologies group will be in the Broadband and Mobility divison, but that has not been announced yet.  It appears that only the consumer Handset division (mobile phones) are being split off.

Unitech PA500
We've received a Unitech PA500 device and we are working on a client for it.  This device is a small form-factor (PDA-style) data collector with a linear scanner.

Opticon
We're looking at the Opticon HT16 / 19 devices.  These are mobile phone-style devices with integrated scanners.  They are interesting units, and we are planning support in ITScriptNet for them.

Don't forget, the time change in the United States occurs this weekend.  This is the new, early time change.  Here is a link to all of our previous Daylight Savings entries, in case you need to find the Pocket PC patches or review the details.

Interestingly, a recent study suggests that Daylight Savings Time may not save energy after all, and in fact may increase energy consumption.  From the article:

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

Devicescape has released a new version of its Connect utility.  This program helps you connect automatically to public WiFi Access Points.  This could allow mobile users to collect data on the road, and then upload whenever they come into range of a public hotspot at a coffee shop, restaurant, or hotel.

We recently ran into a situation with a customer who was uploading very large validation files to a Dolphin 7600.  The customer was having sporadic problems where the uploaded file would not be completely uploaded.  We discovered that the size of the truncated file was always the same as the amount of free space on the device before the upload.  It turns out that when overwriting the file, the device did not reclaim the free space immediately, so the new file had to fit in the remaining space.  We solved the problem by using the DeleteFile function before uploading the new files, which did allow the device to reclaim the free space.

We've added a Knowledge Base Article about this topic, and we will address it in a future release by automatically deleting files before receiving them.

We have scheduled our latest hands-on training seminar for ITScriptNet.  This training will be held on April 9th and 10th at the Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Orlandio, Florida.  The training will cover Application Development and Sales topics, and will include sneak previews of some of our newest products for this year.

You can find out more on our Training page, including the sign up form.  We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to announce that ITScriptNet version 2.4 has been released.  This new version adds clients for Datalogic devices, GPS functionality, new functions, and more.  All of the details can be found here.

Download a demo and try it out.  As always, upgrades from previous versions are at no charge!