 Now it's no secret I've always been a bit of a nerd, but I bet you guys didn't know that I was actually one of those people who carried around not just a cell phone, but also one of these. This is my personal digital assistant and this is from way back over ten years ago when I was running my painting business. I was digging around in my attic looking for like a cable or something and I happened to cross it in the box and get this guys... It still works? So I'm gonna show you what passed for cutting-edge pocket based technology back when I was in university. Okay, so while I was showing this to you guys, I actually realized that my stylus is missing and that might not be the end of the world. The screen does still work without a stylus, but the way that it works is actually fundamentally different. So modern touch screens use what's known as capacitive touch, whereas this was actually a pressure sensitive touch. So here's what here's what that means. Basically if I touch the screen really lightly, you see that? It doesn't have any effect at all. I have to actually press the screen in order to activate things. So for that reason using something with a really small hard point wasn't necessary. You could use the back of a fingernail or something, but it was strongly recommended. Now what I think is that it's possible it just fell out in my pile of accessories. I'll show you guys all this stuff too. Yeah, all right, there we go, that's better. So I guess this is a perfect opportunity to kind of walk through the the physical tour of this thing. So up on the top you got your stylus, you've got your SD card slot and compact flash reader. So that was a pretty unique feature of this one because SD cards at the time didn't go up to massive capacities like 2 gigabytes and also compact flash has a performance advantage if you wanted to load media onto your pocket PC so you can watch on the go. Over here is a headphone jack also useful for watching on the go. I forget what this button does, but it's in the shape of a cassette tape. So maybe it's like a memo to self button that was popular back then. Here's the charging port at the bottom that seems to be a microphone, but it's been a little while. At least one of these is a speaker and then I forget what all these buttons do so we're gonna have to go through and discover them together. Now you might have noticed my screen protector is a little unique. Now I actually spent 500 Canadian dollars on this thing so I was pretty paranoid about keeping it in good shape. So I actually used the included flip down screen protector and like a second kind of crappy plastic screen protector over top of it though to my credit I did do a pretty good job of applying it. I mean taking this thing and holding it up against a modern device there's a few things that really jump out at me. Number one is of course the form factor. It is so thick compared to something like a Note 9 in spite of the fact that the Note 9 obviously is much faster, has way more features. I mean even the stylus is more advanced. It's a wirelessly charging stylus with a remote button pressure sensitivity. Like technology has come a long way in the last decade. Another one is the proprietary charging cable. So generally speaking they were pretty good about providing a charging cable in the box, but the issue was that everyone used different standards and even the same brands would change up their standard periodically. So you could get stuck with a broken or a lost charging cable, no way of charging your device and assuming you can even find one in stock it could cost 50, 60 plus dollars for a replacement. It was ridiculous. It was a bad time. The other thing that really stands out is the difference in screen. There we go. Let's crank this up. Let's go ahead and try adjusting the backlight on this puppy. There you go. That is that is the best it can do. Let's go ahead and fire up a white background here. Whoa! So using this thing in direct sunlight was basically not a thing. Now I want to show you guys the navigation on this thing. So it uses an Intel X scale processor. So that was Intel's old arm based mobile CPU division that they acquired from someone and then later sold to someone. It's totally dead project now, but this thing actually uses I think it's a 500 megahertz processor. I'm gonna go ahead and see if I can bring that up and it runs Windows Mobile. Yeah, that's right. Designed for Windows Mobile, baby. So if you've used a modern touchscreen device, you would probably expect that this is your home button. But it's not. Actually that button does nothing. You were expected to use the stylus all the time. That's your home. The start menu. But it's in the top left instead of the bottom right. So let's go ahead. Let's go back to the settings system about. Here we go. So this is an ARM 920T PX827X. It actually has 64 megs of RAM. I believe that's rounded down because some of it is reserved. We're running Windows Mobile version 5. I was looking for what processor we're using. See I would think that's back, but no. This is actually like a shortcut thing for your quick settings. Right, you can change to landscape. Oh, yeah, look at that. Look at that rotation. Do you think we can get on our Wi-Fi? Obviously no support for 5G. I actually don't even know how to go back. Okay, give me a sec guys. It looks like we're not going to be able to get online. This device doesn't support WPA 2. And I believe our network for security reasons rejects devices that only support WPA. So... Oh well, that was worth a shot. So now I want to show you guys what the desktop looked like on this thing. It was actually called today. So you go ahead and go here and it would have any active tasks that you have. And then it also had your calendar. There you go. So you could see your appointments. The calendar app for this thing. Actually surprisingly was not bad. Now... The whole idea of scrolling something by just clicking on the body of it and moving around, that's a relatively new paradigm. So you actually scroll by grabbing the scroll bar on the side, and then you would create an appointment by dragging something like this. So we would go ahead and click new appointment. Meet David. And you could put in your location. I don't know at the park. Who knows? And then you could edit your times of course by little things in here. Set your reminders. Oh, you could set one reminder. Set one or four. There you go. And you could add attendees. Okay, and okay, boom. And it would show up like that. Then if you went back to today, you'd be able to see yep. I've got some appointments that would line everything up like this. It was actually very functional as a personal planner. Now of course, being an enthusiast, I wanted to do more with it. So that's where the core something media player, I forget what it was called exactly, but it was this great little piece of software. And what was special about it was that it had support for codecs that the default media player on here didn't. So that is what allowed me to load my definitely legitimate media. I do actually own this entire season, so I'm not gonna feel too bad about this, but my definitely legitimate media onto my PDA. So scrubbing performance actually, not bad. Oh, no. Oh, was it? Oh, yeah, there it is. It's the 520 megahertz X scale. Awesome. There it is. Nice. Good catch, David. Now you can really tell even a DVD quality file like this one is not at its best on the resolution of the screen. I don't even know what the screen res is, but it's not pretty. Now I've pointed out a lot of stuff that's kind of ridiculous and quaint about this thing, but there were some ways where it's actually still ahead of some modern devices. So check this out for example. File Explorer. Now this is fixed on the iPad now, but on a modern iPhone, you still can't just browse the root directory where everything is loaded and installed on the device, like looking at your documents or even check this out. You can actually even load up the Windows folder and all the files are just there. Okay, I'm not saying that's necessarily better, but I mean being able to just browse your storage cards like this is incredibly important and I mean configurability. So this is pretty cool if you go into I think it's buttons. Here you go. Check this out. It's highly configurable. So I actually figured out why those front buttons weren't doing anything. It was because I apparently removed all the assignments for everything other than what I used. So this one I left and that tape button, let's see, I apparently had that configured to the Notes application. Hi. Actually, you know what? The latency is not bad on that. Huh. All right, let's see what else we've got on here. Oh, this is cool. So there were actually some pretty surprising apps available for devices like this. This is called Thompson and this wasn't one for me, but this was actually something my wife used back when she was doing her pharmacy training. So you can, we loaded it on here because I think through her school she got a license for this so we can kind of look up any drugs and here's the dosing. I actually wonder if she still has a valid license for this, but hey the information is in here. So if you want to know anything about a 3D vaginal cream, there you go. Free charge. And of course the last thing that I spent a fair bit of time doing on it was gaming. Now there weren't a ton of games, but one of the preloaded ones was actually super addictive and I played this a ton. It's called Bubble Breaker and it's kind of like an early precursor to be jeweled. You line up all the things and then they they pop. So what do you think? Is that all people kind of need to know about this thing? Oh, I have no idea actually. I don't even know if there's a convenient way to shut it down, to be honest with you. The whole thing runs in RAM if I recall correctly, so that's why it has 64 gigs of RAM, but only like 56 of it is accessible. So I think you would just have to rip the battery out or something. There we go. Somehow this lithium-ion battery is still running. So this is a 1440 milliamp hour one. I can go ahead and pop that out. There's your convenient removable battery. So yeah, we could we could open it up with torque screws, but honestly, it's kind of sentimental for me because I really did use this thing for my first self-employed job, and I kind of don't really want to destroy it. It's in very very good working order as you guys can see. Oh, I guess this is where we can figure out how that backup battery figures into things. Yeah, so no this one has the backup battery, but it does retain data if it dies, but it doesn't turn on if the lithium-ion one isn't in, so I don't know. Actually, I guess one thing I didn't show, I was super ticked off about this. So I managed to convince them when my old one died to upgrade me a little bit to this one. This was more like a $700 model if I recall correctly, but I only paid $500 for the original one because I said, well look, my original one isn't available anymore, and it has an IR blaster. So I want like the highest-end one to replace it, and I had one of those service plans for the original one, I had one of those service plans from Canadian Best Buy at the time, so I managed to get this one. But the other thing I was really mad about when I got this one was that it did not come with just a charging cable. It only had a dock. So if I wanted to charge it on the go, I had to bring this whole stupid thing around with me. It's like, who uses it like that? That's ridiculous. Fortunately, I actually checked afterwards, and my old charging adapter for my old one still worked with it, so I kept that instead of returning it with my broken one, and I managed to have two charging cables, which back then, like I said before, was actually a pretty freaking big deal. The other thing I didn't show you guys yet is how you synchronize it with your computer. So this was my charging cable for the old, or my sync cable for the old one. So it was USB 2, it went in like that, and then you had to actually take your power one and put it in there, and that made it pretty bulky, but you could do both data transfer and power because a USB 2 port was not able to power. Like, guys, we take for granted the way that USB Type-C ports can charge a MacBook or whatever, but that was not always the reality. So thanks for watching, guys. 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