Although Demachina is not a hardware vendor, we recently came across a deal that was too good to let go, a large number of new and refurbished HP iPAQ 4150 PocketPCs including many extras including extended batteries as well as the acclaimed Belkin Bluetooth GPS units. This is the ideal hardware combination for a car navigation system using software such as TomTom Mobile, which can be picked up cheaply on eBay or on other web sites. It works great as a Skype phone, MP3 player or even as a remote control for your TV, DVD, Home Cinema or even the new Microsoft Windows Media Center.

Demachina have released a free utility for testing the impact of the backlight on the battery life of a device.

A typical development cycle of a PocketPC application includes intensive battery tests to make sure the application does not have an extreme impact on the life of the device's battery. Such a test is relatively easy to perform unless you want to take the backlight of the device into account.

Our new and free Batry utility makes this process much easier.

The Demachina SWAT team have made available for download their Coding Guidelines and Conventions.

Over the years the members of the team have worked on many projects and technologies. To ensure the work that is delivered is consistent, easy to read and understand, all code adheres to a single unified convention that is described in this document.

By making our guidelines available to the general public, we hope that the overall quality of code that is produced in the community will become of a higher standard.

Perfy, a unique application that integrates PocketPC and WindowsCE devices with Windows performance counters, has been released. Try it now for free.

Perfy is the only commercially available tool that exposes key Windows CE system characteristics such as Available physical memory and Remaining battery life as well as .net Compact Framework statistics such as Number of objects allocated, Execution engine startup time and Peak bytes allocated in the standard Windows Performance monitor. This allows developers and testers to capture performance statistics of mobile applications and chart them out using industry standard tools such as Microsoft Excel.

Demachina has been awarded a contract by one of the world's largest retailers to troubleshoot an innovative mobile shopping application. Like most of our typical SWAT projects, the problem source was identified and a fix was put in place in less than 4 days.

Demachina's SWAT team consists of a number of industry veterans which have a wide range of experience in fields such as e-commerce, retail, databases, business analytics, graphics design, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft .net and general debugging. Each team member has a strong analytical mind and strong troubleshooting skills. The aim of the SWAT team is to take on short projects, usually under 2 weeks, which are in trouble. The SWAT team analyses the situation, identifies the problem and fixes the problem or provides a recommendation in order to resolve the problem.