WM2005 has built-in GPS Support

nej · Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 3:45 pm Post subject: WM2005 has built-in GPS Support

I've managed to load a ROM of a leaked Windows Mobile 2005 Alpha release onto an I-Mate, and the most interesting thing it seems to have added is GPS-sharing capabilities.

Basically, you set your hardward port to accept the incoming GPS, and then set a virtual port that software can connect to and point your software at that - very similar to what GPSGate does, I suppose.

I presume it'll still be there in the final release.

lbendlin · Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 4:10 pm Post subject:

yeah, we 've seen that when the first screenshots came out. I think it will take a very long time until all navigation program vendors abandon their own controller and accept the OS way of doing it. TomTom for example go in the complete opposite direction right now. Same with CoPilot on the Smartphone - they completely ignore the BT stack and find the BT GPS themselves.
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nej · Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 5:05 pm Post subject:

Very true. I'm looking at re-coding an app of mine into .NET specifically for when WM2005 is released, and I expect I'll use the Franson serialtools still, even though a lot of the functionality is there I doubt it'll work exactly as I want.

Darren

nej · Posted: Wed Apr 06, 2005 9:04 am Post subject:

Seems fairly stable, but there's some limitations, mainly memory is vastly reduced (only 16 meg or so available out of 128) and it takes a long time to boot. I think the memory thing is a debugging/error trapping mode or something, and somebody on another forum posted that they think the ROM is actually being copied to RAM to execute, hence the lack of memory.

It's possibly a bit slow, and the ActiveSync 4 beta won't connect to it since I upgraded it. I'm sure all those things will be fixed for the main release.

I can't try Tomtom though, as there's not enough memory...

Finally, the main reason for trying it was to see the affect on EVB apps, as I have a very large EVB app and needed to know if I needed to re-code it into .NET, and it looks like I do. Whilst some apps run fine, the support for CDB databases seems to have disappeared (but I suppose it could re-appear in the full release) which is the killer for me.

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