To those who asked about application compatibility. Windows Mobile 6 has pretty good compatibility for well written Windows Mobile 5.0 apps, that is, apps that are written using published APIs and write to "open" areas of the file system and registry.
JD. I work on the Windows Mobile team and one of the areas I focus on is backward compatibility. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to preserve backward compatibility, so today's application will work on tomorrow's OS.
There are occasions when we break back compat but we usually do so oniously to meet another strategic need, for example, moving to Windows Mobile 5.0 we moved the Outlook databases to a new data store which was better optimized to run from flash store. While the Outlook APIs were updadted to point to this new data store and provide app transparency, some apps had were accessing the database directly and hence needed to be updated. We contacted lots of ISVs about this prior to the 5.0 launch to let them know what had changed and how to fix it.
Sometimes our developers forget that ISVs have resource constraints and ship schedules as well. It's always useful for me to have real war stories from ISVs who have been affected by back compat issues to illustrate the pain we risk putting ISVs through when we make changes.
Feel free to mail me. My e-mail address is my full first name followed by the first two letters of my last name at microsoft.com.
Anything that you can play in Windows Media Player with the appropriate codec installed (OGG, DivX etc) can be sync'd to the Gigabeat. WMP transcodes the files on the fly as you sync OR can transcode and cache all files in the background while you aren't syncing so sync speed is improved. There's an ovious tradeoff there between disk space and sync speed.
Re : Apple DRM
I'm willing to be proved wrong but I don't think Fairplay DRM supports either subscription payment models or the complex time window based viewing windows required by the movie studios of a service like Vongo so that content automatically expires on your device/PC when Vongo's licence to the content has expired.
Re : iTunes MP4 Support
While iTunes uses MP4 as the audio format I believe the tagging information is somewhat proprietary.
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I am trying to configure out a really dumbed down and intuitive PC for my grandmother. She recently had a stroke and while she is under my care I would like to repurpose a laptop for her to surf and email her children. Anyone have any experience with what input devices and UI's are really understandable for the over 80 crowd?"
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