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One of the first things I was interested in when I purchased my 900C was how does it differ from the older HPCs I had owned. One of the obvious differences is the support for external hardware devices. On this page you will find all the hardware I have successfully used with my 900C in no particular order.
ATA Flash Card - This is a card that fits into the pcmcia slot. It comes in various sizes, works like a compact flash card or usb flash drive, but is different in size. The advantage of this card is for people who own laptops that have a cardbus slot, then this makes it an easy way to transfer files to and from their Mobilepro...and even the oldest Mobilepros had pcmcia slots. ATA cards these days are pretty inexpensive, but this wasn't always so...check out THIS advertisement that used to come packaged with the Mobilepro 400.
 Screenshot of the ATA card overlayed on an HPC screenshot showing its properties.
Printers - While the older Mobilepros supported PCL3 printers or some parallel/serial text printers, the 900C supports many USB printers. With your 900C, on the bonus install disk are all the drivers you need to print to a variety of printers supported by the Westtek drivers.
 This Epson C60 printer works great with my 900C, as do all my other inkjets.
USB Hubs - Of course there comes a time when you want to hook up more than a single USB device...and that's where HUBS come into play. I bought this one on eBay for somewhere around $5.
It works great. I just plug it into my 900C USB port and anything else I need into the hub itself. While this one draws power for operation off the Mobilepro USB port, you can tax the power capacity of your unit if you plug in too many devices. So while this one doesn't need an external power supply, it is wired for one as well and when I ran the CDR, keyboard, mouse, and external floppy drive off the Mobilepro (all at once), I had to supply additional power to keep everything running smoothly. Actually, in real life I would never run all those things...I mean if I need all of that, then why not get a laptop to begin with? But it does demonstrate the capability of this device.  PCMCIA Hard Drive - Well, I always wondered how one of those micro-drives would work. I mean I'm sure they would work, but how much current draw and how much heat would be produced. Unfortunately no one has given me one and I didn't want to spend the money on something I might never use anyway. But I did find something else that is nearly the same thing. A PCMCIA hard drive.
It works fantastic, eats up the juice pretty much like you would suspect. Running the thing continuously, playing a looping MP3 audio file cut down my battery life to barely 3 hours. Ouch. But surprisingly, not that much heat was generated. I mean the bottom of the unit felt warm, but it didn't feel dangerously hot. Still for simple mass storage, this one would be hard to beat. This one wasI don't know the specs as I picked it up on eBay for just a few bucks...$25 to be exact...hard to beat.  Wired Ethernet Cards - You may not need them that often, but when you do, nothing else will work. My favorite pictued here, the Socket Low Power ethernet card has worked for years, and works on all my Mobilepros, no additional drivers needed.
 Keyboards and Mice - What can I say, they all work when you plug them in. Wireless keyboards and mice of course do not work, and neither do the scroll wheels on the mice nor some of the special keys found on programmable keyboards. All those pictured below work fine for me however.
 External USB CD Writers/Readers - Sure wish we had authoring software to make these things work, but they don't in the write mode. However, as a player/reader, they work fine. Picked up the Iomega 650s for only $5 on eBay. They work fine.
 USB Hard Drive - I've tried several, and they all seem to work just fine. However, you should choose one with an external power source. Drawing power off the 900C's USB port is just too taxing on the unit.
 Modem Cards - "Now why would you want to have a modem on your hardware listing?" you might ask. My response, "I don't know." Maybe your internal modem might just die or not work, or maybe you have a special modem or something.
Anyway, for grins, I took a 3Com Megahertz 56K Cellular Modem PC Card and plugged it into my pcmcia slot. I didn't have to install any drivers or anything, the 900C recognized the device perfectly. I then went and made a new dial-up connection, plugged in the phone line into the xjack connector and away it went. Worked perfectly connecting to my dial-up service. It is recognized as modem on COM1 by the device.  Compact Flash Cards - As you would expect, they all work, at least sizes up to 8gb. I haven't tested anything larger, too expensive.
 Another type of adapter that I picked up on eBay for only $1 is a Smart Media adapter by Pretec. This one is designed to fit inside the CF slot and allows you to use a Smart Media card. I just happen to have a Smart Media card in my digital camera, a Toshiba M81. I am able to take pictures, pull the card and slide it in my 900C and look at them at a larger format than is possible with the camera.
 USB Flash Drivers - Everyone that I have tried, works fine.
 While this might seem to be a round-about way to read data off a CF card, it also works:
 Wireless Network Cards - First of all they have to be 16bit cards, not Cardbus which is 32bit. Next they have to have a driver written for Windows CE. Nearly all the CF wireless cards meet that requirment, but not all. Also, do not expect 802.11G cards to work...because they normally don't. Only 802.11B cards work for the most part.
 Other cards I currently use with my 900C: Cisco 340 and 350. Linksys WPC11 (check with Usedhandhelds.com for a great deal on NEW cards).
Of course Compact Flash wireless cards are nice too. Some of them you can use in either the CF slot or the PCMCIA slot with an adapter. I tried a 802.11G card. It fit nicely into the front of my Mobilepro 900C, but it was too thick to fit into my SanDisk CF adapter. The manufacturer has a whole bunch of drivers for this card, but the one I got to work was the wl420.ARMV4 cab file. When the card is inserted, it appears to run fine. I was able to connect to the internet. Unfortuantely, no matter what I did, I was unable to get the card to connect in "G" mode. It would only connect in "B" mode.  Cameras - Compact flash cameras, some of them, do work in the 900C, but require WinCECam, a special application to make it work. The Pretec 300 is one of them. It works using the software provided on the Pretec CD, though the drivers have to manually installed. The Flycam, another CF camera works using the pocketpc 2003 software on the 900C, but works much better with WinCECam.
 Here the camera is in the pcmcia slot using an adapter...works fine |