Windows Mobile Network Analyzer PowerToy for WM5-based Pocket PC’s and Smartphones released!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=081c6401-49d4-4506-a03b-c41bc76c2f51&DisplayLang=en

Up to now, it was pretty complicated to track down networking errors on the Pocket PC. I’ve been following these tools on the Pocket PC quite closely (example here) but haven’t really found a tool that would work on current PDA’s with as many connection types as possible. The vast majority of them are Wi-Fi only and, in cases, outdated; some examples:

1. Pocket Warrior: it doesn’t run on current Pocket PC’s (I’ve explicitly tested it on the HTC Wizard, Universal, Dell Axim x51v and Pocket Loox 720) because it only supports the Intersil PRISM chipset (furthermore, Intersil has stopped offering their drivers for free in the meantime, which also means even decreased third party app support)
2. CommView(R) for WiFi PPC: it is the only Pocket PC-compatible tool of TamoSoft. Their other, more generic (not just Wi-Fi only) tools like CommView(R) have no PPC ports.
3. CENiffer 3.0 by epiphan SYSTEMS inc, which is a complete PPC-based sniffer app (and, in this respect, pretty different from this one) seems not to be offered by any more. (Also see this, this and this.)

Others are (MS) Bluetooth-only like btCrawler (but now that the Broadcom/Widcomm Pocket PC BT stack SDK has been made free, this may change). Sure, there is my favourite networking tool, vxUtil I’ve elaborated on in many of my articles, but it’s unable to do really low-level tests. Microsoft to the rescue! I was just going to start writing a complete roundup & tutorial of the, in cases, really nice and freely available eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 remote tools (of which the first utility, CEZoom, I’ve already elaborated on) when I spotted a brand new networking utility, Mobile Network Analyzer PowerToy. It’s capable of doing some really thorough tests and is compatible with all network connection types (again, as opposed to most other tools). This, however, also means you can NOT use it for, say, packet sniffing. Nevertheless, its a very capable tool, taking into account the other tools’ inability to find a great deal of networking problems (and, in cases, costing hundreds of dollars). In addition, compared to for example vxUtil, it’s not only capable of running (pretty thorough) automatic tests but also supports user-added DLL’s for enhancing/extending these tests with your own tests. Compatibility, availability It’s free and available here. It, unfortunately, only supports WM5 (I’ve also tested it on pre-WM5 devices without success). Example screenshots and logs

1. ActiveSync-connected example (please also see the Fundamental ActiveSync networking differences between WM5 and previous WM versions if interested in more information on this setup)
2. GPRS example
3. a no-network example

I’ve also uploaded the resulting logs to HERE (please see the three accordingly named subdirectories) so that you can also test the logs’ thoroughness without having to install and test the software itself. UPDATE (09/11/2006): PPCT frontpage; I've also posted some of my remarks on the relocability of the app there