Pick a Pocket PC peripheral

PDAs based on Microsoft's latest Pocket PC 2002 operating system are flooding store shelves. If their rich feature sets and crisp color screens have you thinking you deserve a present, rest assured that you can at least partially justify your purchase for work reasons. SIP Infotech offers a series of Engineering Tools utilities for Windows CE, as well as the Palm O/S and Windows 9x, ME, NT 4, and 2000. The $35 Electrical Engineering Tools also include a free copy of Engineering Utility Tools; you can download a free full-featured but limited-use demo version from the vendor's Web site.

Pocket PCs deliver numerous benefits, but, alas, nothing's perfect. They also have two key downsides versus their competitors and previous-generation counterparts: several-hour battery life versus several days and an inability to receive power directly from off-the-shelf replaceable batteries. Three products have appeared to bridge this gap.

Ara Engineering claims that its $79.99 ePack external battery pack will continuously power a Pocket PC for six to 15 hours, depending on usage, versus 1.5 to 3.5 hours with the PDA's internal battery. It comes with an ac charger, and you can recharge it thousands of times. DataNation Technologies' $20 or $39 iPowerPak lets you power your Pocket PC or recharge its internal battery using four AA cells. The manufacturer also sells custom-length cables, a belt clip and case, and environmentally friendly nickel-metal-hydride AA batteries and chargers. And Plastecs' $29.95 and $39.95 Pocket-Pal solar cells, the ultimate environmental ally, recharge PDA internal batteries with just a few hours of direct sunlight.

Pocket PC portability is a work in progress without high-speed, no-wires network connectivity. Answering that need are companies such as Symbol Technologies (www.symbol.com), yLez Technologies (www.ylez.com), and Zcomax, which are finally coming through with 802.11b CompactFlash cards. D-Link (www.dlink.com) resells Zcomax's products. Zcomax's XI-800 works well in my Casio (www.casio.com) E-125, and, in less than five minutes, I had it talking to my Buffalo Technology (www.buffalotech.com) WLA-L11 AirStation and Agere Systems' (www.orinocowireless.com) Orinoco RG-1000 Residential Gateway. Cresotech's $39 PocketLANce software even lets me access the files stored on other LAN-resident computers.

If limited memory is cramping your PDA's style, consider the upgrades that Times2Tech offers. Years ago, the company performed some surgery on my trusty old HP200LX and recently performed a $139 16-to-64-Mbyte memory and firmware upgrade to my iPaq 3135, leaving it with plenty of room for the Pocket PC 2002 update that Compaq will soon be offering.

Ara Engineering, pda@araengineering.com, www.araengineering.com/ipaq.htm.

Cresotech, admin@cresotech.com, www.pocketlance.com.

DataNation Technologies, 1-954-530-0684, www.data-nation.com.

Plastecs, 1-508-943-1324, www.plastecs.com.

SIP Infotech, +91-22-8264000, www.enggtools.com.

Times2Tech, ipaq@times2tech.com, www.times2tech.com.

Zcomax, 1-973-664-0310, www.zcomax.com.