Dell Axim 50v and Windows Mobile Five. Ugh.

Dell came through and dropped the promised WM5 upgrade (code named Magneto) in my mailbox, a month late but there it was. I held off doing any upgrading for a personal-record three hours.

I had already known that the upgrade would be bumpy and I had to pay close attention to the warnings throughout the CD readmes. First among all? Your current Dell backup of your Axim will NOT restore to WM5. This sucked, for a variety of reasons:

  1. backing up data was now a manual process using either "Explore" from your ActiveSync connection or copying to a CF/SD card, assumingyou had space

  2. Microsoft and Dell both knew that the upgrade was coming, and had enough time to roll even a one-off data import utility to get that backup restored into WM5 properly



Well, I copied my must-saves to the 6Gb microDrive and did the deal. You upgrade ActiveSync to 4.0, then update the ROM. You do a hard reset twice in the process, and eventually you get WM5 and the onerous task of re-installing your apps.

Dell does provide a two-CD set which has trial apps and limited-utility versions of apps you might like. Software issues so far:

  1. Bejeweled 2 does not work in WM5 thus far, still trying to figure out how to make that happen.

  2. Resco's Explorer, etc. will need to be re-installed, no simple copy operation for this one (and it makes the free Total Commander look awesome by comparison)

  3. Total Commander works normally, hurrah!

  4. PocketPlus stuff needs reinstallation



Some other notes:

  1. You will wrestle with connecting to your wireless LAN if you have SSID broadcast turned off. Temporarily broadcast it, let the Dell find it, then tweak the settings as you need to. This is painful and not a good reflection on Dell or Microsoft. IBM Thinkpads have far superior (Intel based) WiFi radios and software that detect non-broadcasted SSIDs. That may or may not be good in theory but it's great in practice.

  2. Battery life is worse, on average. This is not good, and I'm hoping it improves.<.li>
  3. System response is mixed; I get this lag every now and then that drives me crazy. Max performance or throttled down, makes no difference.

  4. The new taskbar at the bottom sucks. Period.

  5. Your segregated memory functions are now gone. You have an app pool of memory and a storage pool of memory; the "built in storage" and "network" choices are now gone. WM5 is now managing it all for you, ostensibly to put your apps in faster RAM and data in slower ROM. Whatever, I miss the details and ability to figure it out myself.

  6. Speaking of memory, you no longer get the slider bar for "more app room/ more data room". WM5 manages this automagically.



I'm not really appreciative of the latest and greatest features of this. I'm hoping the true power of this comes to fore as I use it. I am already missing WiFi syncing (yep, that's gone). Let's hope that Dell and Microsoft release some updated ROMs to address some of these issues, and bring back some of the missing functionality, especially WiFi syncing. Man, that's a tough hit.

-BrAp

 

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