Pocket Inspector Software and Pocket PC Devices

The market for handheld devices is immature and still changing rapidly. Microsoft and hardware vendors (mostly Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, who have now merged) have produced several generations of devices and their operating software. Unfortunately, the different generations are (by and large) not compatible. There have been five generations of handheld devices that run the Microsoft operating software (for a more detailed history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC#Versions):

1. The first generation was released in 1999. It received little use and we will ignore it here.
2. The second generation was released in 2000. There were two classes of devices, called “Pocket PC” and “Handheld PC”. This generation was sometimes also referred to as “Pocket PC 2000”. This generation ran version 2.x of the Windows CE operating system.
3. The third generation was released in 2002, and was called “Pocket PC 2002”. This generation ran version 3.x of the Windows CE operating system. This is the generation for which the Pocket Inspector software was designed.
4. The fourth generation was released in 2003 and was called “Pocket PC 2003” or “Windows Mobile 2003”. There was also a version called “Windows Mobile 2003 SE”. For our purposes, these two versions are identical. Both run the Windows CE 4.2 operating system. With the addition of special packages, this version was able to run some of the software written for the previous version.
5. The current (fifth) generation was released in May 2005 and is called “Windows Mobile 5.0”. It runs version 5.0 of the Windows CE operating system. With this version, Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility with Pocket PC 2002.

There are two versions of the PAVER pocket inspector software, Pocket Inspector 1.0 and Pocket Inspector 1.1. The table below shows the relationship between the device versions, pocket inspector versions and PAVER versions.

Device	Pocket Inspector 1.0	Pocket Inspector 1.1
Pocket PC 2000	Does not run	Does not run
Pocket PC 2002	Runs with PAVER 5.0 thru 5.2.3	Does not run
Windows Mobile 2003	Does not run	Runs with PAVER 5.2.4 through PAVER 5.3 on some devices (see below)
Windows Mobile 5	Does not run	Does not run

The Windows Mobile 2003/Pocket Inspector 1.1 combination has only been tested on two devices:

· On the HP iPAQ h6315, the software works correctly.

· On the HP iPAQ hx4700, the drop-lists in the software do not work correctly (after a list is dropped once, subsequent drops only show a single item and it is difficult to select). Other operations appear acceptable.