now it's no secret i've always been a bit of a nerd but i bet you guys didn't
know that i was actually one of those people who carried around
not just a cell phone but also
one of these this is my personal
digital assistant and this is from way
back over 10 years ago when i was running my painting business i was
digging around in my attic looking for like a cable or something and i happened
to cross it in the box and get this guys
it still works so i'm going to show you what passed for
cutting edge pocket-based technology
back when i was in university
okay so while i was showing this to you guys i actually realized that my stylus
is missing and that might not be the end of the world
the screen does still work without a stylus
but the way that it works is actually fundamentally different so modern touch
screens use what's known as capacitive touch whereas this was actually a
pressure sensitive touch so here's what here's what that means
basically if i touch the screen really lightly you see that
it doesn't have any effect at all i have to actually
press the screen in order to activate things so for that reason using something with
a a really small hard point wasn't
necessary you could use the back of a fingernail or something but it was
strongly recommended now what i think is that it's possible
it just fell out in my pile of accessories i'll show you guys all this
stuff too
yep all right there we go that's better so i guess this is a perfect opportunity to
kind of walk through the the physical tour of
this thing so up on the top you got your stylus you've got your sd card slot and
compact flash reader so that was a pretty unique feature of this one
because sd cards at the time didn't go up to massive capacities like
two gigabytes and also compact flash has a performance advantage if you wanted to
load uh media onto your pocket pc so you can
watch on the go over here is a headphone jack also
useful for watching on the go i forget what this button does but it's in the
shape of a cassette tape so maybe it's like a memo to self button that was
popular back then here's the charging port at the bottom
that seems to be a microphone but it's been a little while at least one of
these is a speaker and then i forget what all these buttons do so we're going
to have to go through and discover them together now you might have noticed my
screen protector is a little unique now i actually spent
500 canadian dollars on this thing so i was
pretty paranoid about keeping it in good shape so i actually used the included
flip down screen protector and
uh like a second kind of crappy plastic
screen protector over top of it though to my credit i did do a pretty good job
of applying it i mean taking this thing and holding it up against a modern
device there's a few things that really jump out at me number one is of course
the form factor it is so
thick compared to something like a note 9 in spite of the fact that the note 9
obviously is much faster has way more
features i mean even the stylus is more advanced it's a wirelessly charging
stylus with a remote button pressure sensitivity like technology has come a
long way in the last decade another one is the proprietary charging
cable so generally speaking they were pretty good about providing a charging
cable in the box but the issue was that
everyone used different standards and even the same brands would change up
their standard periodically so you could get stuck with a broken or a lost
charging cable no way of charging your device and assuming you can even find
one in stock it could cost 50 60 plus dollars for a replacement it was
ridiculous it was a bad time the other thing that really stands out is the
difference in screen there we go let's crank this up let's go ahead and try
adjusting the backlight on this puppy there you go that is that is the best it
can do let's go ahead and fire up a white background here whoa
so using this thing in direct sunlight was basically not a thing
now i want to show you guys the navigation on this thing so it uses an
Intel x scale processor so that was Intel's old ARM-based mobile CPU
division that they acquired from someone and then later sold to someone it's
totally dead project now but this thing actually uses i think it's a 500
megahertz processor i'm going to go ahead and see if i can bring that up and
it runs Windows mobile
yeah that's right designed for Windows mobile baby so
if you've used a modern touchscreen device you would probably expect that
this is your home button
but it's not actually that button does nothing
you were expected to use the stylus all the time
that's your home the start menu
but it's in the top left instead of the bottom right so let's go ahead let's go
back to the settings uh system about
uh here we go so this is an ARM 920 t px a27x it actually has 64
megs of RAM i believe that's rounded down because some of it is reserved
we're running Windows mobile version 5. um
i was looking for what processor we're using that see i would think that's back
but no this is actually like a shortcut thing for your your quick settings uh
right you can change to landscape oh yeah look at that look at that rotation
do you think we can get on our wi-fi obviously no support for five gigahertz
i actually don't even know how to go back what the okay give me a sec guys
it looks like we're not going to be able to get online this device doesn't support wpa2 and i believe our network
for security reasons rejects devices that only support wpa
so oh well that was worth a shot
so now i want to show you guys what the desktop looked like on this thing it was
actually called today so you go ahead and go here and it would
have any active tasks that you have and then it also had your calendar
there you go so you could see your appointments the calendar app for this thing
actually surprisingly was not bad now
the whole idea of scrolling something by just clicking on the body of it and
moving around that's a relatively new paradigm so you actually scroll by
grabbing the scroll bar on the side and then you would create an appointment
by dragging something like this so we would go ahead and click new appointment
um meet
david and you could put in your location i
don't know at the park who knows
and then you could edit your times of course by
clicking on these teeny-weeny little things in here uh set your reminders
oh you could set one reminder so one hour before
there you go and you could add attendees
uh sensitive okay and okay boom
and it would show up like that then if you went back to today you'd be able to
see yep i've got some appointments and it would line everything up like this
it was actually very functional as a personal planner
now of course being an enthusiast i wanted to do more
with it so uh that's where the core
something media player i forget what it was called exactly but it was this great
little uh piece of software and what was special about it was that it had support
for codex that the default media player on here didn't
so that is what allowed me to load my
definitely legitimate media i do actually own
this entire season so i'm not going to feel too bad about this but my
definitely legitimate media onto my pda so scrubbing performance
actually not bad oh no
oh was it oh yeah there it is it's the 520 megahertz scale awesome there it is
nice good catch david now you can really tell even a dvd quality file like this
one is uh
not at its best on the resolution of the screen i don't even know what the screen
res is but it's not pretty now i've pointed out a lot of stuff
that's kind of ridiculous and quaint about this thing but there were some
ways where it's actually still ahead of
some modern devices so check this out for example
file explorer now this is fixed on the ipad now but on a modern iphone you
still can't just browse the root directory where everything is loaded and
installed on the device like looking at your documents or even check this out
you can actually even load up the Windows folder and all the files are
just there okay i'm not saying that's necessarily better but i mean being able
to just browse your storage cards like this is
incredibly important and i mean configurability so this is pretty cool
if you go into uh i think it's
buttons here you go check this out it's highly configurable so i actually figured out
why those front buttons weren't doing anything it was because i apparently removed all the assignments for
everything other than what i used so this one i left and that tape button
let's see i apparently had that configured to the notes application
hi
actually you know what the latency is not bad on that
all right let's see what else we've got on here oh this is cool so there were actually some pretty surprising apps
available for devices like this this is called thompson and this wasn't one for
me but this was actually something my wife used back when she was doing her
pharmacy training so you can we loaded
it on here because i think through her school she got a um
a license for this so we can kind of look up any drugs and here's the dosing
i actually wonder if she still has a valid license for this but hey the
information's in here so if you want to know anything about a 3d vaginal cream
there you go free of charge and of course the last
thing that i spent a fair bit of time doing on it was gaming now there weren't
a ton of games but one of the pre-loaded ones was actually
super addictive and i played this a ton it's called bubble breaker and it's kind
of like an early precursor to bejeweled you line up all the things and then they
they pop so what do you think is that all people kind of need to know about
this thing what does it look like on the inside
oh i have no idea actually um
i don't even know if there's a convenient way to shut it down
to be honest with you the whole thing runs in RAM if i recall
correctly so that's why it has 64 gigs of RAM but only like 56 of it is
accessible so i think you would just have to rip the battery out or something
there we go somehow this lithium-ion battery is
still running so this is a 1440 milliamp hour one i'll go ahead and
pop that out there's your convenient removable battery so yeah we could we
could open it up with torx screws but honestly
it's kind of sentimental for me because i really did use this thing for my first
self-employed job and i kind of don't really want to destroy it it's in
very very good working order as you guys can see oh i guess this is where we can
figure out how that backup battery figures into things yeah so
no this one has the backup battery but it does retain data if it dies
but it doesn't turn on if the lithium-ion
one isn't in so i don't know actually i guess one thing i didn't show i was
super ticked off about this so i managed to convince them when my old one died to
upgrade me a little bit to this one this was more like a 700 model if i recall
correctly but i only paid 500 for the original one because i said well look my
original one isn't available anymore and it has an ir blaster so
i want like the highest end one to replace it and i had one of those
service plans from canadian best buy at the time
so i managed to get this one but the other thing i was really mad about when i got this one was that it did not come
with just a charging cable it only had a dock so if i wanted to charge it on the
go i had to bring this whole stupid thing around with me it's like who uses it
like that that's ridiculous fortunately
i actually checked afterwards and my old
charging adapter for my old one still worked with it so i i kept that instead
of returning it with my broken one and i managed to have two charging cables
which back then like i said before was actually a pretty freaking big deal the
other thing i didn't show you guys yet is how you synchronize it with your
computer so this was my charging cable for the old or my sync cable for the old
one so it was usb2 it went in like that and then you had to actually take your
power one and put it in there
and that made it pretty bulky but you
could do both data transfer and power because um a usb 2 port was not able to
like guys we take for granted the way that usb type c ports can charge
a macbook or whatever but that was not always the reality
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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also maybe something more modern let's throw like a note 9 down there i don't
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