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First of all we'd like to say THANK YOU for your patience as we tried hard
to continue our support of the BTAccess products with the new PocketPC
2003 / Windows Mobile operating system. It took a while for all the
pieces to come together, but we hope you agree it was worth the wait.
Newer
is not immediately Better!
In May 2003 Microsoft released the newest version of its PocketPC
Operating System, now called "Windows Mobile" or PocketPC
2003. Aside from many new features and faster graphics, the key
impact on our business was that it broke all our Bluetooth products.
This happened for two reasons:
1) The new iPAQ models from
HP included an upgrade to the built-in Widcomm Bluetooth stack, which our
products rely on. The new version of the stack is v1.4. While
the stack itself was released in May on the new PDAs, the related
programmer's SDK which we rely on was several months late. And the
new stack had enough internal differences that our old code would no
longer work with the newer stack, so we had to wait for the new SDK. 2)
The PocketPC 2003 operating system required a new C++ compiler from
Microsoft to generate standard C++ programs. While some applications
could simply be copied onto the new PDAs and run perfectly, for some
reason certain products would get a "This is not a valid PocketPC
Application" message. They needed to be recompiled using the
newer compiler. And when you write your own C++ programs for
PocketPC 2003, you'll no doubt run into the same problems. Ugh!
See details of the compiler issues here. What's
in a Name?
As we studied the changes we had
to make to support PocketPC 2003, we realized our naming standards were
getting very clumsy. Originally we created "BTAccess".
Then the iPAQ 5450 units came out and required a separately compiled
program and v1.3 of the Widcomm Bluetooth stack, but just for these
models. We called this product "BTAccess54". And now
with PPC03, we had to create yet another separately compiled
program. What to call that one?!
We decided we would call our
"new" product "BTAccess Mobile", since more and more
people are using the newer PDAs running "Windows Mobile" (and
fewer are using the older models). And we now call the original
product for the older PDA models "BTAccess Classic", as shown in
the following table:
Platform
|
Works with |
Widcomm
Bluetooth Stack |
Version of
BTAccess Required |
PocketPC
and PocketPC
2002 |
iPAQ 36xx,
38xx, 39xx, or any PDA using Bluetooth CF cards from Philips,
Dell, Belkin
|
v1.2 |
BTAccess Classic
Note: BTAccess54 will run, but won't support PAN profile or
radio control
|
| PocketPC 2002 |
iPAQ 54xx,
Dell Axim, or any PDA using Bluetooth CF cards from Philips, Dell,
Belkin, AnyCom, or TrueMobile |
v1.3
(includes the new PAN Profile) |
BTAccess54 |
| PocketPC 2003
(Windows Mobile) |
iPAQ 19xx,
22xx, 55xx, or any Bluetooth CF cards from Dell, AnyCom, or
TrueMobile |
v1.4
(identical to v1.3, but reconfigured for PocketPC 2003) |
BTAccess
Mobile |
Note that it's really the
version of the Widcomm Bluetooth stack that really determines which
version of BTAccess you need. If you have a question about whether
BTAccess will run at all on a particular PDA or Bluetooth card, first find
out if they use the Widcomm Bluetooth stack, and then find out which
version of the stack is used.
Unfortunately these three versions of our product are not backwardly
compatible. They really are different applications for different
hardware/software platforms. BTAccess Classic really is a separate
application that works quite differently than the other two.
BTAccess Mobile is identical to BTAccess54 in all functions, but we had to
recompile it to a different binary image with the newer PocketPC 2003
compiler. What
about BTSuperPak?
The BTSuperPak utilities have
similar problems under the new operating system. However, rather
than make things even more confusing we decided to bundle each
"version" of the BTSuperPak utilities. So you pay the same
price but get multiple versions. The good news is that for these
higher-level applications there are only 2 versions - one for PocketPC
2003, and one for everything that came before PocketPC 2003.
So what
do I really need?
Believe us, we know this can be
very confusing! To help work through the confusion about what products you
really need for what platforms we offer the two links below to answer your
questions. 1. Improved
Pricing Structure for our products 2.
Short Guide to Compiling your programs for PocketPC 2003 / Windows Mobile
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