Using real PDA buttons

Please forgive me if this turns out to be a stupid question, but...

I'd like to be able to control the flow of a VB application on a PDA by using 2 of its real buttons. By real, I mean ones you have to physically press, rather than images of buttons on a screen.

Each press of the button will just update a variable, but the user will not be looking at the PDA screen and will need to be satisfied that the button press was recognised (a nice physical click, for example), hence the need to use physical buttons rather than touch screen etc.

Are the buttons on PDAs (I don't have one yet) pretty standard, or do they vary by make and model. If standard, I assume the above shouldn't be too difficult, if not, I'm happy to buy whichever specific model lets me do the above.

Thanks in advance.

I don't think that's a stupid question at all!!! However, I also fear that it will not be an easy one to answer. I believe there are a standard set of buttons on all CE based PDA's, though there may be extra buttons on some models.

However, I don't think that a program can directly get ahold of those buttons without API calls. Consider how they are used. As an OS feature, you can set the button to launch a program. This is true for everything except the rocker (as far as I can see). If your program was to receive these button presses, it would have to override the OS use of the buttons, which would not be something the OS should allow easily.

Thanks for the reply. It may not have given wonderfully good news, but it does at least give me some pointers as to how I overcome the problem.

I was also looking at using externally connected hardware, but this doesn't seem to be straightforward on a PDA either.

Thanks again.

I was intending to get into externally connected hardware, but I have put it off until next year (which is not very far away at this time). I will probably be posting about it.