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 title: Reviving the Old Pocket PC
 date: 2021-11-16T08:58:19+00:00
 device: Audiovox XV6600
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I found my old Audiovox XV6600 Pocket PC in storage a few weeks ago
and have been trying to get it back in working order.

As you can imagine, the original battery had ballooned after 15
years in a box, but after a quick eBay adventure I was able to get a
replacement fairly quickly. Surprisingly, that was all it needed to
get working again!

Not exactly the sexiest of devices, I loved this little guy when I
first got it. A gift from my uncle for helping him with some
technical stuff at work, I used every part of the proverbial buffalo
for years.

Class notes, scheduling, (delayed) emails... it was like night and
day when compared with the flip phone I had before. That said, it
wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Memory was at a premium, so a dead
battery meant that my contacts, calendars, and everything else were
lost until I could sync to my computer again, and since I couldn’t
afford a wifi module or bluetooth dongle, the web browser was
effectively useless.

But that wasn’t the point. As a budding professional nerd, there
was something magical about having a computer in my pocket. And as
much as my friends teased me for having such a "huge phone," I
couldn’t care less. It felt like having a sneak preview of the
future (a future where the phones were twice the size of my humble
Pocket PC).

It's been a few days now, and so far it gives me the same feels that
it used to, but now I can appreciate the quirks more. Thanks to a
collection of old dongles and wifi modules, I’ve got it on the
internet (something that is impressively usable thanks to Opera Mini
5.1 [0] and have it syncing with my old Windows XP laptop. Unlike my
excursion into LineageOS, I actually have a plan for this thing...

I’m going to use it to manage my technostalgic experiments. The
tasks list is great, and I can keep my notes in context (I'm even
writing *this* on it). Most importantly, I can give it a purpose,
which means it won’t be languishing in a box anymore.

Now all I have to do is get some email set up and get tapped into
the retro computing scene with a little more gusto.

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[0]: http://m.opera.com
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EOF