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Motorola MC65

Mc65

We have a new PDA in town now. As a replacement for the army of MC9000 and MC70s that are in the field and are being discontinued, we now are moving up to the Motorola MC65. I have had the new handheld for about a week now and have been impressed so far. It's a great improvement over the MC70. I have no idea how the numbering system of the Symbol / Motorola devices works. I assume there must be several ranges such as the 50s 60s and 70s.?

Anyway the?PDA?has windows mobile 6.5.3, a better touch screen and is faster. Much faster. The skin that has been put on the OS has also applied to our software and I think it makes it look much cooler. We had several problems in adjusting our software so it would work with the new MC65. First was the change in resolution. The MC70 has a much lower resolution than the MC65s and as some of our screens were not using the auto scale settings in the form and some of the buttons on our forms were created at run time rather than design time, this posed a bit of a problem for us.?

Ultimately the main way to handle the form resolution changes is to ensure you forms are auto scaling?

Me.AutoScaleDimensions = New System.Drawing.SizeF(96.0!, 96.0!) Me.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Dpi

I calculated the size of the controls that were being generated at run time by taking sizes off the controls that were automatically being sized correctly at design time.?

There were a couple of other problems as well, the speed at which the?PDA?goes was causing some problems when we were using a FileInfo object. When we do an over the air update of the software, there is a certain degree of file handling and the deletion of a file was being reached before the garbage collector came and got rid of the FileInfo object. Without a significant rework there wasn't a nice way to do it so we had to manually gc collect which was a bit of a stinker.?

Every morning our users carry out a download to get the latest stock movements to the?PDAs?for scanning. This is a fairly large chunk of information generally and can often take up to 7 minutes on the MC70. Not so on the MC65. It managed to do the exact same download in just over 1 minute. It made for very interesting viewing because we had always thought the transfer of data was the biggest killer, however it looks like just handling the large datasets that were being downloaded was a major contributer to the slow speed of the old?PDAs.?

The final problem is a real sneaky one. The test unit (in the picture) we had to develop on had an alpha numeric keypad. When you press either the Yellow or Blue function button on the Keypad, a small blue or yellow circle replaces the keyboard icon on the screen. For some reason this stops you from programatically showing the on screen keyboard, causing a crazy exception. When we tried the same thing on the numeric version the problem was not there. Luckily we are getting in the numeric versions and so decided to let some other poor soul worry about this.?
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Comments

Dom Finn said…
Hi there,I have changed jobs since I have posted this. Overall though I was very impressed with the MC65. The quality of the handset was excellent and the speed was a serious jump up if you are used to older handsets!Regards,Dom
27 September 2011 at 17:35
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