I have an old Pocket PC iPAQ h1930 with Windows CE 4.20 on board. I'm not interested in beautiful flash games or watching video on it, so it serves me well for the purpose of reading books. It has about 3.6'' inches screen diagonal, so it can be put into any pocket, that is very handy. It does not have built-in GSM transceiver, so I have to use a separate cell phone in addition. This scheme has three main drawbacks:
1. When you have two devices instead of one, it is easier to forget one of them or to forget to charge one of them.
2. When you have a scanned book in PDF format, Adobe Acrobat, even in "Reflow mode", cannot reformat the strings to shorten them and to fit them into the available screen space. So if with minimum acceptable scaling value the text strings do not fit into the screen height, you have to constantly drag the document view back and forth in order to be able to see the whole sentences. This is rather annoying, although with some practice you become to pay much less attention to it.
3. Sometimes the device for unknown reason goes into totally unresponsive state, and I have to do a hard reset via special technical button and a pen. It happens about once a week or in a few days.
Although despite the above cases, the device saves me a lot of time by allowing me to educate myself during trips in public transport, and I understand, that buying any new modern gadget of similar form factor will not improve my productivity in this area. Electronic books have larger screens, but they are less handy to put into your pocket.
What I like in the device, is that there are many applications already written for Windows Mobile, so I have no problems with viewing of virtually any needed file format. Yes, I know that this OS is in fact abandoned by MS, but this does not matter, since all practically required applications are already there.
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