May 3, 2001

Our April meeting having not produced anything much worth reporting, I am proud to announce that our May meeting was the best ever!  We changed the meeting day, time, and place, and it seemed to work.  We not only had four more folks in attendance (two of whom were named this month's featured users), we enjoyed the food and atmosphere at the Regent Square Tavern in Edgewood, PA. 

As always, Earl passed out t-shirts to the new members, and copies of news articles to everyone.  We beamed around contacts from the new members, and beamed around the agenda as well.  After a lengthy and spirited discussion of various news items, rumors, new product announcements, and a general sharing of all things Pocket PC, Earl pulled out the new Pocket PC magazine, which again lists our organization in its user groups section.  Chad demo'd a new game called EcoAct (or Eco Fight), which is a free download (see links page) and managed to share the file with the new Casio user present.  Earl then got in on the games act with a short demo of Shadowgate in landscape mode on his Ipaq.  The device count for this meeting was 4 Ipaq's, 2 Casio's, one Jornada, one Jornada handheld, and <ahem> one Palm.

We decided to keep the meeting nights on Thursday for now, and to rotate the location around to various parts of the city, until we find somewhere we like best, or get sick of changing the location.  As such, next month's meeting will be at 6:45 p.m. on June 7, 2001, at the Monroeville, PA Denny's restaurant.  The room is already reserved.  See everyone next month!  Someone bring a digital camera so we can add more pics to the web page!

March 9, 2001

The fifth meeting of the Pittsburgh Area Mobile Technology User Group was a momentous occasion, in that it was a big step in our journey toward representing a cross-section of the computing public.  To elaborate, it was our first meeting with a woman in attendance, and our first meeting with a child in attendance.  Both were welcome and participated.  Topics discussed at the meeting were customizing calendar entries, flash media content and readers, a game demo of V-Rally, hardware demos of the Otter waterproof case and the Grinder Gear soft case shown in the photos below, more demos of the handy-dandy Targus stowaway keyboards for the Compaq and H-P PocketPC's (also shown below) and even a demo of a stuffed toy that Victor claimed was a Windows CE device (see photo 1 below).  Although we did verify that the Microsoft logo was on the toy, we could not find a WinCE logo anywhere.  We also discussed the use of a C-Pen for scanning in conjunction with a PocketPC, and demo'd some ActiveSky multimedia content (see photo 8 below).  After the meeting, we enjoyed a pleasant dinner at Dingbats restaurant on the ground floor of the lovely Oxford Tower downtown Pittsburgh.

Here are a few photos of our March meeting.  See you all next month!

February 2, 2001

The fourth meeting of the Pittsburgh Area Mobile Technology User Group was possibly its best to date.  Members met for about two hours, and discussed a number of topics over pizza and other snacks, including the new version of Ziogolf (a brief demo was given), the Palmax @migo pocketPC, wireless solutions, bluetooth, and other issues.  Many contacts were exchanged between new and old members, and we even tested Conduits Software's Peacemaker application, by exchanging some information with the one palm os unit that somehow managed to slip into the room.  Our newest member, Justin, gave an informal presentation on the capabilities and outlook for bluetooth (which we were all very interested in) and discussed the possibility of bringing some bluetooth devices to the next meeting to set up a short range network and test the capabilities of the system.

Earl also passed out some hard copies of information about one of the new Super Nintendo Emulators (check the links page for details), the new greyscale Ipaq, and lots of other topics of interest.

It was announced that one of the members (Chad) will be presenting a talk on the PocketPC and its capabilities before the Pennsylvania Bar Institute, on February 22, 2001 in Philadelphia, as part of a presentation on handheld computing.

It was also announced that due to the pending move of the offices of Thorp, Reed & Armstrong to their new location at the Oxford Center, next month's meeting will be postponed for one week, until March 9, 2001, at the new office location.  Specific directions will be posted on the events section of this web page soon. 

Finally, we also want to send a greeting out to the Cajun Clickers (a PocketPC SIG from Louisiana, from what we understand), who sent us a very nice email saying they liked our website.  Hello down south!

Here are a few photos of our February meeting.  See you all next month!