[General Topics] Menneisyys:
2.1.	WinMobile Download Accelerator (WMDA) 1.8.1.0 (Build 2805)

This is, as has already been pointed out, a standalone downloader app (not a plug-in). It's a bit pricey ($20.00) and can be pretty slow in some downloading situations but well worth the money if you want to stick with "pure" PIE / IEM (without using PIEPlus or Webby, which are, currently, the only WM5-compliant PIE plug-ins with Save Link Target functionality; or, without switching to, say, Opera Mobile or NetFront, which both have much better download compatibility / capabilities) and often run into problems like "the CAB file I've clicked is displayed and not downloaded".

It's unique in that it's the only Pocket PC download application to support multisegment downloading (see the next section on what it means and when it can be advantageous). This means it's particularly recommended if

you often download files from slow(er) Web pages where multisegment downloading may be of use

you use plain PIE / IEM (NOT with a Save Target As-capable PIE plug-in like PIEPlus 2.0+ or Webby) and often have problems with rendered (and not downloaded) binary files

As opposed to what the developer's homepage states, it's not only compatible with WM2003 and WM2003SE, but also with WM5.

It's pretty extensively configurable; for example, you can even supply server auth code and enter referrer explicitly, which is very important with several Web sites (see the Caiman section in Chapter 3 for more info). Some other screenshots: 1 2 3.

Note that it also integrates into PIE / IEM, even under WM5, unlike EzDownload. That is, if it intercepts a download request (you click or, to the Address bar, enter a link that, for example, ends at .EXE or any predefined, freely editable "binary" extension), its dialog will come up and will be used for downloading. This can be configured in Tools / Options / IE; it's also here that you can supply a referrer (just like with EZDownloader).

The download extension list can be freely edited and new extensions added; for example, if you want to add CAB to the list (so that, when you click a CAB link, it'll be downloaded by WMDA and, if you aren't lucky, just rendered as a text file by PIE), just add ".CAB" to the list as can be seen in here. Then, the text/plain-related problem of PIE (of which I'll speak in the next, third chapter) won't be an issue any more - whenever you click a link that ends in .cab, it will be passed to WMDA for download. (Note that the same doesn't apply to NetFront or Thunderhawk - WMDA doesn't integrate into any other Web browser.)

2.1.1.	Where can WMDA be really useful? Multisegment download and the (dis)advantages

You may have already heard of desktop Windows-based download managers like FlashGet and/or GetRight. The former is free software, the latter commercial. Give (one of) them a try if you're a serious downloader - you'll really like the really enhanced speed. Both support all the three major desktop Windows browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

These plug-ins really speed up most transfers by using multisegment (parallel) downloads, which means the client not only downloads the given file in one thread, but in several.

On the Pocket PC, there is a similar solution delivered by WMDA. I've done a lot of tests to find out how good and reliable it is. I've also made some extensive benchmarks comparing the one-threaded and the (by default) five-threaded multi-segment mode of it with both fast and slow sources.

When accessing really fast (over 30 kbytes/s transfer speed) sources, you will NOT want to use it because it's definitely slower than the native download speed of ANY Pocket PC Web browser. However, if you are downloading something from a very slow HTTP server, the situation will be different: I've measured about two times shorter download times with WMDA than with any other Web browser (Opera, IEM, NetFront etc. - with slow sources, these one-threaded / one-segment browsers all produce roughly the same transfer speed).

The benchmarks of accessing (downloading from) fast servers will be in a later section elaborated on (because, unlike with the "slow" case, then, there may be considerable differences in how quickly a given Web browser downloads files off fast servers, which also necessitates a big chart listing a lot of cases and benchmark results).

The "slow server" case is certainly worth elaborating on: it's downloading from servers with slow connections that WMDA really excels (and, in addition, helping with downloads that, otherwise, would result in the browser's trying to render the binary contents of the file instead of downloading it).

For the slow test, I've used two well-known (at least from here Europe) "slow" servers: that of revolutionary software front and Octopus Studio (see the Definitive Roundup of All Pocket PC Dictionaries Part I - WordNet-based English Dictionaries and the Pocket PC Wikipedia Bible for more information on their, in cases, excellent products).

With the former site, I've chosen this file for testing; with the latter, this. Both are around 8 Mbytes. For the test, I used my Dell Axim x51v and downloaded to main storage (in this case, there is little importance of this because of the slow speed - it's only with fast downloads that the device model and the target of the download may have any effects on the overall speed, not with comparatively slow, 10-20 kbytes/s downloads.)

I've conducted the tests several times (listing all the individual results in the table cells below) to get as usable results as possible and to "weight out" the extremes. Note that cells with only one benchmark result can be safely ignored because the non-segmented download time benchmark results wildly vary. The results are given in minutes:seconds; the smaller, the better.

THE CHART IS HERE - CLICK THE LINK!

As can clearly be seen, with both servers, WMDA resulted in a clear speed increase in both cases. With the Revolution.cx file, it took less than 4:16 in all cases to download the file, while, with Opera Mobile, at least 60% of the transfers took more than 5 minutes (once even 11 minutes). The case is very similar with the octopus-studio.com tests.

2.1.1.1.	Usability matrix - when WMDA should be used?

I've also created a matrix showing when using WMDA may be really a good idea. (Note that it does not contain the case of binary-files-not-offered-for-download case, which can be an issue with a plug-in-less PIE. If you have PIEPlus 2.0+ or Webby, you won't need WMDA to fix the above problem; in all other cases, you will, unless you're ready to hunt the file cache by hand.)

In the matrix, I show four cases: accessing slow/fast servers through slow/fast connections. All this compared to the speed offered by regular, traditional one-segment-download Pocket PC Web browsers (except for the slow Thunderhawk, which is even slower than WMDA in the "fast server" case).

Note that

I've assumed the server allows for multisegment downloads. Many don't. With them, you won't be able to use WMDA (or, you will be able, but in one-segment mode only, which will result in a really bad (further) speed decrease and, in addition, an additional byte containing a zero byte added to the file. This both means in this case you will not want to use WMDA but use "traditional" downloading methods / browsers instead).

I assumed slow client Internet access is in the range of GPRS speeds (3-5 kbyte/s) - that is, at least 3-4 times lower than the throughput of the slow server (which I considered to be between 5-20 kbyte/s, which is pretty common - see the above-tested two "slow" servers). By fast Internet access, I mean over 1 Mbps speeds; the same stands for fast servers.

That is, the chart:

THE CHART IS HERE - CLICK THE LINK!

That is, you should only consider using WinMobile Download Accelerator if you aren't downloading from fast servers (where you can download with more than 20-30 kbytes a second from). In all other cases (accessing a fast server), WinMobile Download Accelerator will deliver clearly inferior speed than all the other solutions (except for the even slower EzDownload and ThunderHawk), as will be clearly seen in the forthcoming, "fast server" download benchmarks.