As X50v users start receiving the WM5 upgrade package. I thought it would be good to have a quick refresh of Windows Mobile 5 overview as well as some good articles I gathered across the Web.
To: MODERATOR, please leave this thread here, at least for few weeks, then you can move it to the software forum. And if possible to make this "sticky". :approve:
Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0
Fact Sheet
Microsoft Corp. is working with device manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and mobile operators to create a new generation of sleek and powerful Windows Mobile™-based devices for people who want to stay connected while on the go. Windows Mobile software creates new opportunities for industry partners, allows greater productivity for mobile professionals, and provides industry-leading multimedia integration for end users across a range of form factors, including Smartphones, Pocket PCs and Portable Media Centers.
Windows Mobile 5.0, the newest installment of Microsoft’s software for mobile devices, will power an entirely new generation of phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and media players. Based on feedback from partners and end users alike, Microsoft® Windows Mobile 5.0 delivers new productivity enhancements, offers an increasingly rich multimedia experience, provides mobile operators and device-maker partners with more opportunities to develop differentiated devices, and allows end users to better customize devices to fit their needs.
Enhanced Business Productivity
Windows Mobile 5.0 offers updates that make device users even more productive when working away from the desktop:
• Microsoft Office software for Windows Mobile. For Windows Mobile 5.0-based Pocket PCs, Word Mobile now supports tables, lists and embedded images, giving workers greater flexibility to create, edit or review documents. Excel Mobile allows users to view and create charts and graphs, and PowerPoint® Mobile allows users to view and rehearse presentations while on the go. The back seat of a taxi or an airplane now can be a mobile office.
• Persistent storage. Persistent storage has been added to Windows Mobile 5.0-based Pocket PCs, which will help ensure that users don’t lose important data when devices run out of battery power. In addition, overall device efficiency has been improved, yielding as much as 30 percent more battery life.
(See Post#2 below!)
• Faster access to e-mail. Windows Mobile 5.0 users will have faster access to e-mail and information and an improved experience with MSN® Messenger. MSN Messenger now offers seamless instant messaging (IM) access for friends and colleagues; and faster, one-key access to Hotmail® and MSN inboxes within Outlook®. (See more here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobi.../strategy.mspx)
• ActiveSync® 4.0 support. Windows Mobile 5.0 offers users new features such as the ability to sync pictures in contacts and wirelessly sync over Bluetooth®, as well as an improved partnership wizard and an improved overall synchronization experience.
• Security. Windows Mobile 5.0 is compliant with the FIPS 140-2 standard.
Superior Multimedia Experience
Windows Mobile 5.0 now includes Windows Media® Player 10 Mobile, adds support for technologies such as hard drives and Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0, and enables improved media content organization, making it an amazing platform for multimedia devices:
• Easy synchronization. Users can easily sync media files, playlists and song ratings right from Windows Media Player 10 Mobile on their desktop PC, and listen to them on their mobile device.
• New formats and content. Windows Media Player 10 Mobile supports a variety of file formats including Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video and MP3; Customers can now access more than 1 million protected digital songs and videos from online services such as Napster, CinemaNow, MusicNow, Movielink and MSN Music.
• Hard drive and USB 2.0 support. Windows Mobile 5.0 adds support for integrated hard drives, allowing users to carry several gigabytes of music or information right on their phone or PDA, and provides added support for USB 2.0, which will greatly increase file transfer speeds and synchronization of information between PCs and Windows Mobile-based devices.
Ability to Customize
Windows Mobile 5.0 includes numerous enhancements that allow device manufacturers, developers and end users to customize the Windows Mobile user experience, add new functionalities to specific devices, and develop new applications:
• For end users. End users now can take a picture from their phone and easily assign it to a contact for display not only in the Contacts application, but also in the caller ID window and e-mail message header when that contact calls or sends e-mail. Pictures also can be assigned on a PC in Outlook and synchronized to a user’s device.
• For operators and device-makers. With Windows Mobile 5.0, device-makers can take advantage of wireless technologies including 3G and Wi-Fi. Windows Mobile 5.0 enables partners to build devices for Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) networks and supports simultaneous voice and data transfer. Windows Mobile 5.0 also adds support for Wi-Fi in Smartphones, which will allow for a new generation of small, connected devices. In addition, device-makers and mobile operators now have greater flexibility to customize branded device experiences and can take advantage of extensible menus and new soft keys to build new features, such as push-to-talk (PTT), right into the phone dialer.
• For developers. Developers can take advantage of a host of new managed code and APIs in addition to a new ARM-based emulator, which enables them to build applications more quickly and add new functionality to applications. The new APIs include Camera Capture, which can integrate camera functionality with third-party applications; State and Notification Broker; Contact Picker; enhanced messaging and Pocket Outlook Object.
What Persistent Storage is all about, Windows Mobile 5.0
Why Persistent Storage Is A Good Thing
Here's a quick primer on why you want Persistent Storage on your Pocket PCs.
Persistent Storage (PS) on PocketPC is new for Windows Mobile 5.0. (All Smartphones since the original 2002 release have had PS.)
Previously, your user data (email, contacts, calendar, settings, apps you installed, etc) were stored in RAM. RAM has the advantage of being really fast, but the significant disadvantage of needing a constant source of power for it to hold its data. Leave your device unplugged for long enough, and you'll lose all your data. Fixing that was the primary reason for moving PocketPCs to Persistent Storage.
PS gives you a nice sense of certainty about your data. Batteries running low? No problem. Worst case, the device shuts off and you can't use it again until you get to a power supply. But when you get there, it'll boot back up and all your data will still be there.
But PS has a number of other effects that might not be quite so obvious.
Would you believe that moving to PS can double your battery life and enable devices with significantly more storage than were previously possible?
Here's why. Remember that RAM requires power to keep its data. The amount of power needed is linear with the amount of RAM. That is to say, 64M of RAM needs twice as much power to keep it running as 32M does. 128M needs four times as much power as 32, etc. And this power drain is constant. The RAM is sucking your batteries dry while the device is in use and while it's suspended. It even continues to drain your batteries when they are "critically low" and the system won't let you turn it on. Also, people didn't buy 128M RAM devices for the program space. They bought them to store stuff in. And those devices had lousy battery lives as a result.
Flash ROM, on the other hand, burns pretty much the same amount of power regardless of how much you have. A 32M flash part burns about the same amount of power as a 128M flash part does. And a 1G flash part is pretty much the same as well. So, by moving to a system where I store my stuff in flash, not RAM, I can put more storage in without requiring a bigger battery to compensate.
But wait, there's more. Pre-Persistent Storage, Windows Mobile had what we called "the 72 hour rule." If you've ever seen a PocketPC run low on batteries, at some point it pops up a dialog that says something like, "You're running out of power, you should stop now." If you keep using it, it'll come back a little later with a more dire warning saying something to the effect of, "You'd better save your data now, because you're on the verge of losing it." Then, a bit after that it comes on and says, "That's it, I'm shutting you down." At that point, you can't use the device again until you plug it in. How much battery charge do you think you have then? 5% maybe?
Try half.
Yes, when we shut you down because your batteries were "critically low," they were still 1/4 to 1/2 full. Why? Because, if the batteries ever fully died, it would be catastrophic. You'd lose your data, and that's, in our opinion, one of the worst things that can happen. So we made a requirement and held our OEMs to it. The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were "critically low," they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours. The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you'd still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger.
A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.
This is why switching to Persistent Storage can radically improve your battery life. With PS, we removed the 72 hour requirement. We'll let you run your batteries completely dry, because we know your data will still be safe. Right off the bat, that buys you a significant chuck of time. It also means that no one ever has to make a 128M RAM device again. They can fall back to 64M devices, which burn less power, and store the user data in tons and tons of flash. You'll definitely see 128M flash devices. And there's no barrier to keeping you from seeing 256M, 1G, etc devices. That couldn't have been done with RAM.
Downsides? Yes, nothing is free. Flash is much slower than RAM. Reading and writing large amounts of data will take longer on a PS device than it did on a RAM device. That initial sync that pulls down 400 contacts and 5000 emails will take longer. Some write operations will seem a bit more sluggish. But I believe you'll find that the upsides significantly outweigh the downsides.
ActiveSync 4.0 USB Connection Troubleshooting Guide
In some specific cases, Windows Mobile device connectivity to a Windows PC running Microsoft ActiveSync 4.0 may experience connection problems. This document will describe the known issues, and how you may resolve these issues.
A continuation of my "More Persistent Storage Stuff" entry, which is a follow up to "Why Persistent Storage Is A Good Thing." These are responses to questions asked in various places as a result of the first post.
Performance concerns
Flash can be 10+ times slower than RAM. Won't that mean the device is going to crawl? No, not really. Again, remember that this isn't a new trail we're blazing. We've been doing this for years, and many others did it before us. In many cases, we buffer the data first and write it out in the background. In other cases, even going ten times slower isn't something you'll notice. Something could go from taking 1/100 of a second to 1/10 of a second and you still wouldn't notice it. Also realize that this change doesn't do much for application launch times. Application code has always been stored in ROM.
That said, flash is slower than RAM, and there are places you'll notice it. Any place where you need to write a LOT of data, you'll likely see a slowdown. For instance, the initial sync where you've got 400 contacts, 100 calendar appointments, and 1000 emails (that's typical for me). I definitely see that taking longer than it would if it were going into RAM. But subsequent syncs don't bother me much. Another potential place is large 3rd party applications. A while ago I wrote a flashcard program to help me study Japanese. The dictionary that it needed to load on start was 5 Megabytes. Storing that in RAM would have gone faster than storing it in flash. Of course, I still stored it in flash (on a storage card), because I didn't want to eat up that much RAM. But if you've got an app with an enormous (for a small device) dataset that you need to read and write regularly, you may see it take longer than it used to.
But I don't expect typical user scenarios of reading email, browsing the web, listening to music, etc. to be affected.
Is 64M RAM enough?
A number of posters have said that they want more than 64M of RAM. I have a number of things to say about this.
Realize that moving to Persistent Storage (PS) frees up a significant amount of RAM. Before PS, RAM was split between storage and applications. Every file you put on your device lowered your RAM by the size of that file. By moving files to PS, all of the RAM can be used as RAM.
Microsoft doesn't have any "maxium RAM" requirements. If an OEM wants to put in more than 64M, we won't stop them. We do have a battery life requirement, though, so they have to put in a big enough battery to compensate for more RAM. If there's a market for devices with more than 64M, an OEM will release a device to serve that market.
Because of the 72 hour rule, it was almost impossible to do 256M RAM devices in the past. Now that PS has removed the 72 hour rule, those devices are possible. I don't think it's likely that you'll see 256M RAM devices, but, again, if there's a market for them, OEMs can make them now.
Modern batteries don't like to be discharged
Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries don't like being fully discharged. If you let them discharge completely, it will start to damage them. An argument has been made that, since it was catastrophic to discharge the batteries before (you lost your data), no one did. Now that you don't lose your data, maybe people will be more lax about this and ruin their batteries as a result.
This is true, but I disagree that it's an argument for not going to PS. If you're concerned about your battery, don't let it discharge all the way. That was true before PS and it's still true afterward. If anything, the world is in a better spot now, because PS makes it easier to do removable batteries in PocketPC. Pre-PS you ran the risk of losing your data on swapping batteries, so OEMs avoided it. Now that's not a problem, so OEMs have an easier time doing removable batteries. At least with removable batteries, if you ruin one, you can get a new one for a fraction of the cost of a new PocketPC.
Suspend vs. Shutdown
I didn't go into enough detail on this. Although PocketPC now has the Smartphone Persistent Storage scheme, it still has a different power scheme. The differences in their power schemes would fill an entire blog entry (yes, I'll do one on that subject later). But, briefly, the PocketPC power system didn't fundamentally change. It still suspends, just like before. It doesn't do a full shutdown, the way a Smartphone does. The main differences in this regard between WM2003SE and WM5 are that the 72 hour requirement has been removed, and we flush cached data to flash on suspend. (We do it with the screen off so you don't realize we're doing it.)
Ram vs. other power drainers
People correctly pointed out that the backlight and the CPU burn more power than the RAM does. However, I ask that you reread my description of the 72 hour rule. That rule caused a 128M RAM device to reserve half of a typical battery's charge. Removing that is huge. Also, the typical user has his or her device suspended for a larger percentage of time than it is running. Most people have it suspended while they're sleeping, etc. When the device is suspended, the backlight, CPU, and screen are off. During that time, your RAM is still burning power. On a non-phone device, RAM is basically the only thing burning power when suspended. Twice as much ram there means half as much suspend time.
Other things we could have done instead
Some people asked why we didn't give you a slider to make your own choices regarding the 72 hour rule. Many of the iPAQ devices do exactly that. We didn't go that route because the 72 hour rule wasn't the main problem we were trying to solve. The main problem we were trying to solve was the bad story that, if you forgot to plug your device in over the weekend, you'd lose your data. I know that power users learned to live with that. I've never lost my data due to forgetting to charge my devices. But the story had to be fixed. Devices shouldn't bend us to their needs. It is the devices that need to bend to our needs. And needing to worry about finding a power outlet every few days to keep something catastrophic from happening was just wrong. That was the problem we were trying to solve. Being able to remove the 72 hour rule was gravy. Really, really tasty gravy, but gravy nonetheless.
Others asked why we didn't implement what amounts to laptop hibernate. We talked about that. Trouble is, it's terribly inefficient. Either you write the entire contents of the user store to flash, or you implement everything we did for persistent storage. The former would be too slow. And, if you're doing the latter anyway, why not just go all the way to PS and not waste the RAM? The basic trouble with the hibernate solution is that it requires two copies of everything, one in RAM and the other in ROM. Laptops can get away with this because they have more storage than they know what to do with. But that's not the case yet with PocketPCs. So we've got to be efficient with our use of RAM and ROM.
What happens when a bad guy gets my device?
Someone posted that they felt secure in the knowledge that if someone got their device, it would eventually run out of power and their data would be cleared. This is a false sense of security. If you've got data on your device you don't want to fall into the wrong hands, you absolutely, positively, should password protect it. If someone takes your device to get your data, they're not going to forget to plug it in.
As for the question of whether or not there's a mechanism to clear your data (cold boot) in Persistent Storage, yes there is. All OEMs will provide some mechanism for erasing your user data. The mechanism will be different from device to device, but every device will have it.
Innovation
There have been a number of posts berating us for waiting until 2005 to do PS on PocketPC. We deserve those. I wish we had done PS a long time ago. No great conspiracy here. Just a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it all. You can argue that we should have done PS before features X, Y, or Z that we did in the past, but other people would say that, no, those features were more important. We're doing our best to make the right product, and we're willing to keep working at it. Whether PS is thirty years late as a recent feedback implied or just in time as another did, I'm just glad we've got it now.
Others have pointed out that this or that product had PS before us, so therefore we're not "innovative." Folks, I never said Persistent Storage is innovative. I said that it's a good thing.
Some of the stuff we do is innovative. Some of the stuff we do is keeping up with the Joneses. This is how every single competitive product on the planet works--from automobiles to zoology. And this is how it's been since the dawn of time. Some of you will scream shrilly that "M$" has never done a single innovative thing. And, though I disagree, nothing I could ever write would convince you otherwise.
No, there's nothing innovative about Persistent Storage. If a marketing guy tries to tell you otherwise, send him to me. But PS is a good thing.
So what you are saying is that future WM5 programs will have RAM requirements to run some of their software? Like a minimum of 20MB of ram, etc? Kind of like regular computer programs have? Or am I missing something?
Storino03:
1-all the program designed for Mobile platform will consider the RAM limitation of mobile device, so you don't have to worry
2-the OS normally manage all the open/minimized programs and dynamically adjust the RAM comsumption. However, It is good to install some task switcher (e.g.Pocket Plus, Wisbar Advance) to perform the "real close" of the program when you no longer need them. If Your question is about leave lots of program opened without minimizing or closing them, yes, you will exhaust your RAM eventually.
1-7:00 AM leave the X50v/MW5 at maximum speed, play music in loop mode at max volume, keep the screen on, turn on BT & WiFi..
2-9:00 AM: receive a warning: Power remains 4%, device will go to sleep mode
3-9:02 AM: X50v shuts off and refuses to turn on. I leave it off....
4-9:45 AM: Replace the depleted battery with an extended battery at full charge. And turn on the Axim
5-Turn on the X50v. Everything was back as before, music resumes, etc..No reset needed.... :approve:
WM5/PS passed the power drained test :-) with flying color! I assume, when the message " device is going to sleep mode, WM5 destages the whole environment to BIS to preserve the environment.
However, for best practice, please keep a backup handy, preferable on your storage card just in case of a sudden hard-reset. You will loose all the settings for add-on programs + Today plugins.
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WM5 Good Education!
