Pocket PC - My new favorite application...

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I have a Pocket PC Phone Edition device that I carry around with me pretty much all the time, I've had Windows CE handheld devices going back to the first clamshell H/PC 1.0 device that went on sale at the 1996 PDC in San-Diego - I've found the PIM functionality to be very useful, it's so much easier to look up a meeting location on the Pocket PC (or my SPOT watch) than it is to crouch in some random hallway, whip out the laptop and launch Outlook to figure out which room you are supposed to be in.

But there's always been something that's bugged me about these devices, the fact that I need to hook the device up to my desktop PC to get my calendar and e-mail sync'd back to the device, if I have a wired/wireless network card and am on the corporate network then I can sync back to my desktop PC over the network, but it's only now that I have a Pocket PC Phone Edition that has GPRS support that I REALLY have the right device, I have e-mail being delivered directly to the device, I can reply to mail, post blog entries, browse the web, and I can run applications that require network connectivity - and it doesn't matter where I am...

Beyond the basic applications that ship with the device I find the most useful application I have running on the device recently is the NavMan GPS navigation software https://www.navman.com - I have a NavMan Bluetooth GPS device that lives on the dash of the car, when I get into the car I can run the GPS application on the Pocket PC and get directions to my destination - of course I don't need this to get to/from the office, this is most useful if I'm going to an address I've not been to before, or on a longer trip - on these longer trips you typically get onto the freeway/motorway and are pretty happy with driving without map or directions, it's when you get within 20-30 minutes of your destination that you really need directions - it's great to have turn by turn voice commands to get you to the destination - the next useful step would be to integrate traffic information into the navigation application so that I could be auto-routed around any problems without even knowing the problem exists - the only issue there is that if everyone has a GPS navigation device they will all be re-routed and you will be stuck in traffic again...

- Mike