Resurrected...

Last year, HP released the Windows Mobile 5 upgrade for HX4700 users. This was good news to users like me since Pocket Office was practically useless back then and Office Mobile is definitely a welcome upgrade to us. Furthermore, its unparallelled hardware specifications were believed to harness the potential in the new OS.

We were wrong.

The upgrade is a major disaster. Because of the compaction issue in new OS, the device performed worse than a entry level PDA. The device ran like a snail, to the point that rendered it nearly unusable. All of us were frustrated. Those who couldn't stand it reverted back to the old OS. For me i called HP countless times, demanding for a solution to fix what they had broken. And they listened. They released a patch months later.

Although the patch helped to fix the problem, but the performance was still anything but justified. It's still running very much slower than its original OS. I gave up on HP for the hope to provide us with another solution to fix the remaining issues. Then i used the device less often other than occasional recording of my vehicle's fuel consumption and occasional GPS use which is a pain due to the sucky performance. The device was almost left unused.

Almost a year passed. Don't know why, i suddenly felt like revisiting the site where the forum discussed abt the PDA. When i read the threads, saw the usual topics....complaints about the performance and shit like that. Then a thread caught my attention: a PDA expert posted a topic pointing to a developer site where a Russian programmer Kozhura obtained a newer base rom of Windows Mobile 5 and modified it to enable flashing to my device, Best thing is, it fixed the performance issue! Without hesitation, i downloaded the rom, flash it to the PDA and guess what, it performed as what it should have performed in the first place! Everything is so snappy and no frustration is felt by me at all. I couldn't be happier!

Then i digged deeper into the developer forums and amazed to find that Kozhura had even released Windows Mobile 6 rom for the device! This freaking rocks! Without thinking much, i downloaded the rom and flashed it to the PDA.

The performance on the device is now very very much better than what I've used a year back. I had found new uses for this revived powerhouse. It is now my PMP which I plays music thru my iTech bluetooth headset (I also noticed that it supported AVRCP functions, meaning I can control music playback with the headset's music controls) and watch divx videos thru the VGA screen. Only thing left untested is the GPS software which i can only do it when I got my next vehicle...

Moblogged with N93