User's Manual

CHAPTER THREE - PL3000 BASICS
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referred to as ‘ActiveSync’, but it is embedded in the part of a ‘Windows Mobile
Device Center’ (WMDC) software package in the Windows Vista systems.
In addition to the difference that the UBS connectivity requires the driver of its
own on the workstation but the Bluetooth connectivity does not, there is also
another difference between these connectivity types. You cannot plug USB cable
directly into your device but you need a device cradle for the PL3000 into which the
USB cable can be connected. Bluetooth is a cableless means of communication
and there is no necessary need for the device cradle because of the PC
connection.
There is yet another difference. Establishing the PC connection over the USB
link is a plug-and-play operation, meaning that the connection establishment
begins automatically when you put the PL3000 into its device cradle. In practice,
the connection establishment over the Bluetooth link is triggered manually with a
double-tap on the ActiveSync desktop icon, although the Bluetooth Device
Properties applet makes available an option to start up automatically.
Power
A Power applet provides the control of system power state transitions from the
highest power consumption state to the lowest. (The power states are described in
the section ‘Power Management’ on page 43.) The actual control is based on the
adjustment of three timeout periods that are applied either to AC-powered or to
battery-powered mode. For each of the periods the system has to remain idle until
the change in lower power state can happen, and finally after three idle periods in
succession gets the system suspending itself. In addition to controlling the power
management of the device, the ‘Power’ applet provides information on battery
status, and on the power status of the sub-systems such as wireless LAN adapter,
audio system, and barcode scanner.
Regional Settings
A Regional Settings applet covers the settings of national language support
(NLS) in Windows Embedded CE, and in particular the extent of the NLS
implementation on the PL3000. The NLS is about date, time, calendar, number,
and currency formats. Furthermore, the applet opens up options to select user
interface and input language but for those features the support may be very limited
on your PL3000.
Storage Manager
On your PL3000 there can be two non-volatile storage devices that can be
managed using a Storage Manager applet. The applet allows creating and deleting
partitions on a storage device as well as formatting the whole volume after
dismounting it and deleting all the partitions on it.
Storage Manager refers to a storage volume as the name of the block mode
device driver for its hardware. On every PL3000 there is an ‘MSFlash’ storage that
denotes the Flash directory in the file system. If there is an add-on non-volatile
memory card such as SD card installed on the device, its name is ‘DSK1:’ in the