I first tried it out just a couple of minutes before my classes started. Except to ooh and ahh over the landscaped Today and Microsoft Reader screens, I couldn't do any serious examination of the landscape mode before the lecturer walked in. As usual, I hit the Power button and shoved my E-115 Pocket PC into its pouch.

Little did I realize that my Pocket PC was actually still turned on! So, for the entire hour the lecture lasted, my Pocket PC just irradiated light and heat into its pouch! You can imagine just how hot it was when I finally extracted it out of the pouch at the end of the lecture. :(

It appears that the Power button won't work with landscape mode enabled. Pressing it will only cause the Pocket PC to jam and show the following screen :-

Not an enviable position, I must tell you. After all, I have already burned off an hour of battery power for nothing but a hot pouch. Also, there's the risk that this may turn out to be a really serious crash that may not be resolved by a simple soft-reset. Luckily for me, a soft-reset was all it took to resolve the problem.

So, if you want to power off your Pocket PC, you will have to switch to portrait mode first. Jimmy Software would do well to look into this problem.

Screen Alignment

Another thing that immediately caught my attention was the fact that my Cassiopeia was not responding properly to my stylus taps. I had to tap the screen several pixels higher than the intended target to hit it properly. As you can imagine, it made for frustrating navigation and use sometimes.

This problem is only evident when the Pocket PC is in landscape mode. There's never a problem when the Pocket PC is in portrait mode. Realigning the screen solved the problem but it will recur once you switch to portrait mode and back again. As this is a nuisance, I hope Jimmy Software will come up with a solution in the next version.

What Else

Well, other than the two major problems I noted above, I didn't really see any other major problems. You see, I knew about the password problem beforehand. :)

Oh, there are many other problems with the landscape mode but none of them are really due to the utility itself. It does nothing more than switch between portrait and landscape modes and it does that well enough.

Now, let's check it just how well it works with various Pocket PC applications.