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 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.