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3Com & Psion to Join Forces for Wireless Internet 68

Posted by Hemos from the a-long-time-ago-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away dept.
A reader wrote to us with the news that Psion and 3Com have agreed to join forces against WinCE. Software will be portable to either platform - Psion's or PalmOS and they will continue to work more closely together. Psion has support already from the biggest cell phone people - Nokia included, a great starting position.
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3Com & Psion to Join Forces for Wireless Internet More

3Com & Psion to Join Forces for Wireless Internet

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  • StrongARM-based devices could run 68K code in emulation, and get better performance than the Dragonball in your Palm.
  • True, but the majority of current Psion devices are based upon the ARM 7100 running at relativly low speeds (16Mhz-36Mhz depending on the model). The Series 7 does have a StrongARM at 133Mhz, but like all similar devices, the typical use is the processor stalled as much as possible to conserve battery power. Running high MHz chips to emulate the dragonball doesn't seem like efficent usage of resources.
  • One might have said the same thing about IBM fifteen years ago...

    It really comes down to what suceeds in the market. Microsoft charges an awful lot more for its OS than 3Com does (I saw $30 vs 50 cents here on /. not too long ago), and Microsoft can't afford to break into *every* market the way it did with IE.
  • I just got a Psion 5mx last week

    AFAIK, The psion EPOC32 SDK, is now free to download, £10 on CD... Hardly exorbitant,
    althought a 100MB+ download ( for C++, java and OPL SDKS) can be painful.

    The only problem is it is tied into MS Visual C -d'oh ! I emailed psion about this, and got told
    that they had no plans to port their SDK to linux in the immediate future - but their SDK includes a complete EPOC implementation "WINS" that runs as a process under Win32. A similar "LINS" system would certainly be possible, but non-trivial for them to port, which is probably their main worry, apart from the fact that linux may become an epoc competitor.

    However, the standard compiler for EPOC in the SDK is gcc, and their SDK includes other custom command line tools which run under MSDOS, but which look like they'd be a recompile-job for linux. The emulator is not absolutely necessary for development, so I suggested an initial release of their command line tools compiled for linux, which would be just about enough to ease epoc development on linux.
    You could, I suppose, get by (ish) with wine and dosemu, but I'd prefer to have native tools,

    Perhaps if more people/ people who carry more industry clout than me ( :-) seeing as I'm just a masters student in manchester...) were to get on to them, they'd change their mind. It seems silly to tie in epoc development to an MS product...
    check out www.epocworld.com for dev. info

    Voice imput would be cool. There's was a package called voiceshell on the amiga that used to run acceptably, with a 255-word vocab (one or more of which could be "load new vocab bank" - thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...) on my (overclocked to!) 42MHz 68030 amiga, back in the good old days, so I suspect it would be possible on a 36MHz ARM...

    There are several versions of tetris for free download on psion-related websites. Most are "freeware", some "shareware"

    I can't comment on the java vm on the Psion 5mx, but I've successfully run the java vncviewer on my psion - it's slow (though I did manage to use netscape on it over a (null-modem) ppp link), so I'm looking into a port to native code...


  • > 255-word vocab (one or more of which could be "load new vocab bank"- thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...)

    255-word vocab (one or more of the words could be "load new vocab bank xyz" - thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...)

    It could run ARexx commands, which meant that integration into the Amiga OS was trivial.

    So, let the psion voiceshell run OPL/Macro5 stuff...
  • Although, AFAIK, epoc is not open-source, it is designed to be cross-platform, like the linux kernel - i.e. psion can recompile epoc for different cpus and system architectures. There are currently the ARM 7100 and WINS (x86, running under windows) ports, but they are porting to some motorola arch. (not sure if it is 680x0).

    Epoc C++ programs are supposed to be source compatible across epoc supported architectures.

  • Cross platform applications that run on embedded devices! Amazing! Who would have thought of it?

    Oh yeah, Sun did.

  • Its kind of amusing that my little 8meg winCE box can do all of the things listed on that wish list... Granted the free development kit is NOT in C, but its still a nice language. I am normally as down as anyone is about microsoft, but I have been a big proponent of hardwired OS's for a long time, and microsoft has the first *GOOD* implementation of this that I have seen in a while. I wish I could run CE on my win Box.
  • I am not a big fan of the windows 9x operating systems, mainly due to their lack of stability, and that fact that you cant do nearly as much with them as you can with linux. However, I really love my Philips Nino. Being able to read news on the fly, write mail, etc is a very nifty thing. Granted a palm can do pretty much anthing a nino can, but the impressive screen resolution on the nino lets me do minimalistic graphics design, then sync the file over to my windows box to do the real work in photoshop.

    More on topic, I don't necessarily thing the cooperation will be a good thing. In trying to defeat one 'evil' (i.e. microsoft) Psion and 3com may be creating another evil. It is important to remember that all corporations are fundumentally out to make money, so an agreement between the two corporations is not going to be about bringing a better product to the user, its going to be about combining technologies to make a more attractive, and therefore more expensive one.

    In the long run this may prove to be a good thing if it does provide more competition for either side, but I would be unhappy if either winCE or palm/psion continue to have an unequal share of the handheld market for the simple fact that compeption DOES force companies to implement better products.

  • Ouch! (Score:1)

    by euroderf ( 47 )
    Its kind of amusing that my little 8meg winCE box can do all of the things listed on that wish list...

    Once again: ouch!

    Then again, not being WinCE has merits too ...

  • wince is one of microsoft's less bad products, but it is still sucky compared to epoc's design. To call wince "good" is a little over the top, when it's still very inefficient and bloated compared to epoc.

    I would never say I was a propenent of harwired OSes - I'd much rather my PDA's OS was on flash ram, so I could upgrade it/replace it with something else. (n.b. this is _not_ possible with my psion, AFAIK)

    For a given processor power, I'd prefer epoc to wince - but most wince PDAs have faster CPUs than epoc ones, mainly to compensate for wince's overhead, but some include a margin over and above. The psion series 7, however, pretty much puts paid to that, given it runs at 133 MHz.

    I haven't seen wince voice recognition, myself.
    How powerful is it - is it like the level I'm suggesting, where you say "word" and the wordprocessor opens, or what? (i.e. voice /recognition/, not voice recording...)
  • My Touchpoint phone has an accessory listed
    for a cable that plugs it into a DB9 serial
    port. Supposedly, this allows it to be used
    as a modem for data and fax.

    In addition to that capability, it has a
    web browser built in, which I've actually
    used to get driving directions from maps.yahoo.com. It does an RSA key exchange, and
    an ecrypted link. That's quite cool, but I'd rather just use the phone as an external for my
    notebook.

    Which of you geeks has tried this? (Which of you
    developed it?) I've heard conflicting reports that a pcs phone is fast as a modem, and is slow.

    Which is it?

  • Yes!! (Score:1)

    by chrome ( 3506 )
    This news is excellent! Psion's are great, and some kind of interoperability between the Palm and the Psion will mean a lot in fighting Windows CE's advances on the market.

    Cant wait! :) (first post hehehe)
  • Why would anyone want to use the internet on their cell-phone? Nevermind: The idea itself is a great one. I'd love to use the internet on my cell-phone if it was even remotely usuable. Maybe with this sort of teaming, we can get a combo and have decent wireless communications with a PalmPilot (which has a big enough screen to be useful), but GOD I wish they'd stop pretending that telephones could ever be good web-browsers.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I mean, I like it as much as the next Linux geek when M$ gets bashed. But let's look at the facts. When the major corporations (Intel, IBM etc.) have gotten Microsoft out of their way and another OS (f.ex. Linux) has become dominant in the market what insures that the giants wont turn on us then. I mean, I would expect that their main mission is to become OS independant, wheather it's Windows OR Linux.

  • About that link... (Score:3)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Wednesday October 13, 1999 @04:56AM (#1616687) Homepage Journal
    Note all those options specified in the link? With a little tinkering, you can make an ordinary article just a little [bloomberg.com] more eye-catching.
  • IMHO WinCE is already losing. It isn't like WinCE is capturing more of the market. Everyone likes the PalmOS, and now that more companies are seeing that it is the direction to go (and some even dropped their WinCE handhelds) we may see a continuing trend in this area. We can always hope at least.
  • Looks like microsoft has yet another thing to worry about (create a 3compsionmyths page about?). Nice to see people teaming up to make quality software against redmond.
  • Is is just me, or does this article not really say that much? What, exactly, are the two parties going to be doing?

    I'm *really* not convinced that apps can be made portable between the two - the EPOC SDK is extremely complicated, and although I haven't seen the PalmOS one I wouldn't have thought that they were at all similar. Perhaps the app engines could be made portable, but things like user interfaces would still be a problem.

    Unless they use Java, which EPOC supports - does PalmOS?

    Jon
    http://www.epoczone.com/
  • All I can say to that is, Don't make me puke!
  • it reads: buy a new machine every time the alliances are changin. and they often change.
  • This is good, forge an alliance and fight against the common enemy.

    You ask: What will they do when Linux is in place of Microsoft as the dominant operating system?

    Well, come on, what can they do? This is the beauty of it all, all they can wait for is something better, and who's going to beat thousands of coders giving up free time to develop Linux into the best there is.

    Up the Revolution, viva Linux :)
  • Alliances, in the past, have often turned out disasterously for one or all parties concerned. Only time will tell if this is going to survive into next week, let alone for a timespan long enough to make a serious impact.

    Then, Microsoft is beginning to pick up on the embedded & hand-held markets, again. And they have some serious resources they can throw at things. If they break into the market, then it won't matter how good the alternatives are, they'll fail.

    On the flip-side, if 3Com and Psion can pull this off, and deliver a coup de grace to Windows SE, that might deliver some HUGE shock-waves to the market, way beyond merely who controls that one sector. For Microsoft to admit defeat, even in an area they've never done well in, their image will be seriously damaged in -every- market. Once someone has been beaten, they lose the aura of invincibility, not just with that opponent, but with everyone. There would be a real danger of competitors in other markets taking the battle to Microsoft, rather than allowing themselves to be controlled and dominated.

    Depending on how this turns out, it could be the end of 3Com & Psion, or the end of Microsoft domination in computing in general. In business, image is EVERYTHING. Who wins, wins big. Who looses, looses it all.

  • I wish people would realise there's more to the Internet than web serving. A lot of existing and planned services would be very useful even without a normal UI.

  • Everyone likes the PalmOS

    Do they? IMO PalmOS is far too underpowered. Use EPOC for a while, and you'll see just how much is missing.

    Mind you, PalmOS's lack of features has done wonders for it's simplicity, and hence it's accessibility to the non-technical public.

    Jon.
    http://www.epoczone.com/ [epoczone.com]

  • Neat-O (Score:1)

    by MouseR ( 3264 )
    This is really nice, and will help developers alot.

    I work for Corporate Software & Technologies where we do software for these two platforms (as well as WinCE) to complement our corporate scheduling software. (In fact, I just finished work on the Mac conduits for Palm.) We work in collaboration with Lexacom to share the pain that it is to support all 3 platforms.

    This new collaboration between Psion and 3Com will certainly help in delivering new products to these platforms dur to the projected interoperability, and certainly give one more incentive for shareware and freeware developers to widen the selection of available add-ons to these platforms.



  • Isn't it interesting that when a company such as Palm with 40+ percent of the market alone and Psion with about 10-13 percent of the market team up, nobody makes any noise about them practically OWNING the market?

    Let's be a tad realistic here: have you people tried actually using a WinCE device lately?? They SUCK compared to any PALM device.

    Doesn't this count, by US laws, as a monopoly? Remember how they made laws that said that Ma Bell couldn't have more than 40-some-odd percent of the market? What gives?



    --

  • Ex-squeeeeeeeeze me?

    I read your message in hopes of seeing something
    like "I have the touchpoint phone and the rs-232
    cable and it works like this yadda yadda"
    not "blow it out yer ass?"

    How is that supposed to help?

  • For one, I'm not even interested in wireless mail &c for as along as there's a per-message charge.

    Pagers and cell phones were the same way. They never entered mainstream culture until economically priced calling packs are available with more messages or minutes than anyone would use.

    The imposition of having to consider the charge of each and every communication, or of having to select which friends 'deserve' your number or e-mail simply keeps it from blending into comfortable, everyday use.

  • In response to your wish list: Voice Reconition will come along when they make a mic input for the Palm.

    - Sam

  • Interestingly enough, the screen on a Psion handheld is either 640x240 or 640x480 (colour) ... they're not quite pocket sized anymore, but with them attached to (not part of) a cell phone, the Internet would be very usable. I'd expecially love to have one in a holder on my dash board to use mapquest from :).

    ... all hardware evolves slowly until its supported by Linux ...
  • Double tap? EIKON (the EPOC UI currently used in PDAs) uses one tap to select; tapping a selected item performs an associated action (eg launching a file). There's no double-tap. :-) But seriously, it does appear that this is the plan; to implement the PalmOS interface on top of EPOC, and perhaps to add a Palm-compatability layer to it as well. Jon.
  • >MS did some bad and ugly things to push their >non-standards against WAP and have, quite simply >put, annoyed a lot of people here. MS proved >again to be full of sh*t, in every respect. could you quote some examples ?
  • I would also like to add that Nokia as a corporation doesn't like Microsoft. MS did some bad and ugly things to push their non-standards against WAP and have, quite simply put, annoyed a lot of people here.

    Could you cite some examples?

  • I recently narrowly decided on the Qualcomm Thin Phone over the TouchPoint (actually made by Denso, but since no one here knows that name, they don't volunteer it.) Came down to thinness and cost (~$80 less) on the plus side, and smaller display and no vibrator on the minus side.

    It also has a built-in web browser and optional data cable, which seems to be hard to get at the moment, but appears to have a DB-9 serial cable on the other end. What I'm curious about is what this thing looks like to the software - a direct serial link for PPP or CSLIP? A modem that ignores the dailing stuff? Is Sprint my wireless ISP now?
    To the point, what do I have to do to get a wireless inet link through the ThinPhone working on my Caldera-powered Libretto?

    If anyone out there's done this, I'd love to hear about it.
  • Its basically just for opening programs and doing simple tasks. To be perfectly honest I dont know how good it is, cause I haven't trained it. I am already a big enough geek without talking to my PDA ;)

    As far as processor goes, why are you even concerned about a processor on a PDA? The only thing that I do that is even remotely processor intensive is the ocassional browsing of those nifty little mobile channels. It would appear that microsoft *GASP* didn't write very efficient code for interpreting the page layout. The Mobibook reader for CE does a much nicer job of it, but it also ignores the table layouts and neater parts of HTML that the Mobile channel does cover.
  • As you can imagine, I have signed a non-disclosure agreement with momma-Nokia. However, I have found this excerpt from an article. It's not directly related to WAP, but it shows MS's attitude:

    In significant contrast to recent mega deals,
    Microsoft has just acquired STNC, a small 40 strong
    British software company founded in 1993, based in
    Bury St. Edmunds. No purchase price has been
    announced.

    Perhaps just a small deal on the side?
    Not according to industry commentator
    'Peter PDAntic'. He interprets the move, along with
    the previous acquisition of Swedish company
    Sendit as part of a deliberate strategy to control
    the related middleware and pivotal enablers for
    the Symbian Alliance's EPOC operating system,
    which Gates has already declared to be one of
    Microsoft's biggest threats.

    PDAntic says Gates probably argues that if
    Microsoft can't (yet) control or own the major
    players of the Symbian alliance such as Nokia,
    Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushits, then perhaps
    they can buy as many as possible of the
    middleware enablers. "Money, after all, does
    talk", he says.

    Davis Haskin of Allnet says STNC's products
    (already available or under development) include
    key parts of the EPOC operating system, especially
    EPOC communications and browser code, as well
    as WinCE software. STNC's Hitchhiker smart phone
    platform includes a TCP/IP stack, a microbrowser,
    e-mail support and other tools. Symbian has
    recently licensed STNC's web browsing software.

    MS got them just to piss off those who want to make WAP-based clients, including Nokia. However, Microsoft was very late and feet-dragging to join the WAP Forum (www.wapforum.org). It was not long ago when on our meetings we spoke about MS as "noticeably missing" from the WAP Forum. No wonder, they were pushing some proprietary protocols, and I have completely forgotten by now what they were. MS made some partnerships, but as we know, whoever is in bed with MS gets screwed. For MS partners, not to adopt WAP would be really screwy; WAP is taking the industry by storm and everyone and their dog is adopting and developing on it.

    Another excerpt, this one a bit OT, but sweet:

    According to Bloomberg, market consideration
    of the Motorola results boosted optimism for
    Nokia whose shares rose Euros 0.75 to
    Euros 90.7.

    But meanwhile, Finland's industry minister,
    Erkki Tuomioja, is reportedly worried about Nokia.

    According to Digital Strategies Europe, the
    minister believes that Nokia may be a takeover
    target for Microsoft.

    The minister is said to be concerned that such a
    move by Microsoft 'would be impossible for Nokia
    and the Finnish government to resist' and any
    such deal would seriously undermine the
    Symbian alliance and Europe's chances of
    overtaking the US in the ICT field.

    Microsoft is said to be known to be increasingly
    interested in Nokia's market, especially in the
    WAP-enabled smart phones business.

    MS's strategy: if you can't beat them, buy them :o)



    No wonder, since WAP is a very nice, open protocol suite modeled upon the Internet protocol stack.




  • You're probably right about talking to the PDA. It's bad enough seeing people with hands-free mobile phone sets, walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, without people yelling "sheet!" and "word!" and "mail!" at random... :-)

    As for processor power, it's always nicer to have more rather than less. Apps like voice recog. do require power, as do things like Encore (A work-in-progress Psion doom port...)




  • I predicted this... in a way (Score:3)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Wednesday October 13, 1999 @05:19AM (#1616711) Homepage Journal

    I joined Nokia at the time they invested in Symbian, together with Ericsson and Motorola. (Note: Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson are the three biggest players in mobile phone market, and otherwise there is bloody competition between them.) I was/am a fan of Palm and so was a bit disappointed, believing Nokia would have been better off to invest in the Palm OS. OTOH, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola (and now Matsushita and Philips and who else..) know well where they put their money. They certainly wouldn't cooperate on a project if they weren't sure it's going to be turbogood, and strategially important.
    Also, please note how Nokia has really *huge* know-how of embedded and special purpose OSs. I don't mean only the GSM (and nordic) phones, but also the multiprocessor/modular DX-200 switching platform.
    So in the end Nokia decided to use Epoc *and* Palm OS. Why not? They are both great embedded OSs, efficient and well designed, and as such it's easily possible to find synergies.

    I would also like to add that Nokia as a corporation doesn't like Microsoft. MS did some bad and ugly things to push their non-standards against WAP and have, quite simply put, annoyed a lot of people here. MS proved again to be full of sh*t, in every respect. That's (probably) one of the reasons Nokia chose Linux for it's multimedia set-top/wireless Internet access device.

    And, just as another example, Linux and *BSD are meeting with less and less resistence in the corporation, you can see these boxes everywhere now! A good place to work for a nerd (which I am not (fingers crossed)).
  • OK, they've gotten their heads together. So here's a wish list for Psianta Claus and 3Dolf the Infrared-Nosed Reindeer:
    • Full implementation of Java Micro Edition
    • Including a decent javax.comm interface to a JavaRing / iButton !
    • Strong client authentication in hardware -- a key pair -- for crypto, Bluetooth, HBCI, etc.
    • A free (i.e. costless) developer's kit
    • That alternative to Graffiti that came out of (IIRC) NYU
    • Simple voice input (say, a 20-word vocabulary)
    • Tetris :-)
    • Have all this ready when GPRS hits the streets !
  • CNET has a similar article here [cnet.com].

    T.
  • It will be interesting to know how they intend to have software to run on either platform.

    Palm has a 680x0 family CPU, while Psion is ARM CPU.

    Psion does have it's interpted OPL language, which could be used to write cross-platform software, but it's a little limited for writing advanced applications.

  • It's about being mobile (Score:3)

    by mairas ( 102089 ) <mairas@iki.fi> on Wednesday October 13, 1999 @05:54AM (#1616716) Homepage
    I think the main point here is not about dominating the PDA field, it is about which operating system gets chosen for the mobile multimedia terminals. Face it, mobile wide-band technologies are here in 2-3 years. First there will be GPRS (GSM Packet Radio Service), which provides connectionless data transmission through GSM networks with a reasonable bandwidth. A couple of year from that, 3rd gen. mobile networks will be emerging, and they will provide 256 Kb/s - 2 Mb/s of bandwidth. Think about it, that will make continuous real-time multimedia streaming feasible. Streaming Mp3 or even MPEG4 to your mobile terminal! Now when you think that in the most advanced countries (Finland, that is), already 85% of the active population have cellular phones, and current mobile phones will be gradually upgraded to mobile multimedia terminals, dominance on that market begins to look pretty important. The PDA, or even the desktop market, seems almost insignificant in comparison. Since ALL of the major mobile players are with Symbian, and none (AFAIK) with Microsoft, it -- at the moment, at least -- seems like MS is missing their launch window to the major market of the future! Interesting, isn't it?
  • I'm hoping they keep the nice PalmOS interface, but rip out the pathetic excuse for a OS that reside underneath it, replacing it with the Epoc kernel. The layered approach of Epoc would probably make such an attempt feasible. Similarly, there is one or two things the Epoc UI designers could learn from Palm (whoever came up with the idea of double-tap?)
  • Though I'm always glad to see someone fight M$, I haven't been as impressed with the progress of the Palm platform. Aside from the recent addition of wireless access (admittedly a big change), the OS and apps really haven't changed much. Some people say the simplicity is good, but I think the simplicity can be maintained with advances in the platform. It would be nice to see higher resolution, more bit depth, sound input (now on some Handspring models), etc.
  • by Anonymous Coward on 16:50 Wednesday 13 October 1999 CDT I have the touchpoint phone and the rs-232 cable and it works like this blow it out yer ass

    I'm still not quite sure I understand. I think I'll have to get the thing and try it myself to be sure.
  • &nbsp&nbsp Now, let me ask you moderators something...
    &nbsp&nbsp How can this post be redundant? &nbsp It was the first one, so wouldn't the later posts be the redundant ones? &nbsp I think some of you are a little trigger happy. &nbsp Heaven forbid that a first post might have some merit.
  • So far there's been one response, some AC who can only say "blow it out yer ass."

    In my opinion, the thing had damn well better look like a modem, e.g., something that can take AT commands. It's okay if there's no dialtone. But if I can't use it to dial directly to my choice of hosts (e.g., the shell on my home computer), and/or use it as a faxmodem from my laptop to any other fax point, it's just about worthless to me. If I have to use Sprint for an ISP, and only some specified protocol, it's equally useless.

    Sprint has failed miserably at answering any of my questions about this. I even asked if I could email and engineer who has worked on the project.

    Now my only hope is if such an engineer reads slashdot.
  • It looks like Bloomberg fixed their servers to not display what I've specified in the section header (although the banner ads are still gone).

    Either their news stories switch to static content after a while (blech) or I've singlehandedly effected a change in their web page coding strategy.

    That's offtopic, but pretty damned cool.
  • Why would anyone want to use the internet on their cell-phone?

    Why, so we can surf while driving, of course.

  • A 66 MHz PowerPC could emulate a 7.5 MHz 68000, and run Mac Plus apps about an order of magnitute faster, even under emulation. Given that a Palm is 16.5 MHz; it's possible for a decent 16-36 MHz RISC processor (ARM7) to emulate it and have around the same performance level. The problem is that most high performance emulators require a lot of fast cache accesses. Thus cache size and memory system power consumption might be the bigger hurdle in a handheld system than CPU clock rate.
  • >>Everyone likes the PalmOS

    >Do they? IMO PalmOS is far too underpowered. Use EPOC for a while, and you'll see just how much is missing.

    So underpowered that shirt pocket size units have excellent battery life. If you want something with a lot more power and features, and even less battery life, try linux on a sub 3 lb. laptop.

  • That's missing the point. I don't consider 25 hours of intensive work on two AA's (which is what I get from my S5) a bad battery life.

    What I'm getting at is that all of the Palm *apps* (and also the underlying OS) have a very limited feature set compared to the EPOC equivalents. As I say, investigate a 5mx or a Revo you won't want to go back to your limited Palm - except for the fact that the EPOC devices are too darned big. :-)

  • It's bad enough seeing people with hands-free mobile phone sets, walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, without people yelling "sheet!" and "word!" and "mail!" at random... :-)

    Or complete strangers leaning over and declaring "Delete all .. confirm .."

    Which reminds me that in films, the robot always has a name, so that it knows when it's being spoken to. Sort of like my 1972 Chevelle. And in robot tradition, the name of the robot is its creator's name, backwards.

    "D'nomder! Delete all! No, I don't want to see this dialog next time dammit!"

  • >is awesome technology now. Yeah, it's >microsoftand yeah it's wince, but I vote for >better technology anyday. I think this is complete vapourware. MS has lost it's vision. They had to get together some trendy vision about wireless systems. Truth is that big companies like Siemens, Bosch etc. spent YEARS for developing decent 'simple' GSM phones. I mean many GSM phones that were introduced before 1998 [In Europe] had either problems with hardware (battery, size, display etc) or with software (lack of options, idiotic features) when compared to Ericsson and especially Nokia. Some of them can't STILL get them right (for example Motorola) IMHO. I wonder how well a company like Microsoft with virtually no experience in this field succeeds developing a SMART phone. Even Nokia has obvious problems with it's new 7110 WAP Phone. It should have reached market already, but haven't seen them yet.. MS has lot's of money but buying know-how seems to be quite difficult..
  • If MS did admit defeat on WinCE, wouldn't the Symbian/Palm combo start looking dangerously like a cartel? (In the handheld market at least.)

    IANAL, but running a cartel, like eating people, is wrong, isn't it?

    Regards, Ralph.

  • "Mr. Gates added that the phone would have an amazing one hour battery life (standby: 5 minutes talk time). The screen will be 640x480 resolution, five inches across and three down, thus fitting comfortably in the palm of two hands."
  • Yes, that's true - most of them require a keyboard though, which is something that just doesn't belong on my telephone. My point is that a phone shouldn't have to be a computer/browser. It can just be a phone, and be good at what it does. If I want wireless access, I'll use a palmtop machine AND a phone (or a combination thereof)

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I'd expecially love to have one in a holder on my dash board to use mapquest from :).

    :smug.What, you mean you don't already?:esmug.

    Heh, I'll say this for European standards (GSM) and general sloth-ity: we always take our time but we occasionally get it right

    Or to be less jingoistic and slightly more accurate, my current combination of Psion 5 ("classic", if you will) and Ericsson SH888 has already allowed me to:

    • Do email from a train in the Scottish Highlands
    • Read Slashdot in a field in Berkshire
    • Compose & send Email-via-SMS from the comfort of my own car. In Germany.
    • Receive stock quotes via SMS from wherever I am

    ...And all without a cable (phone and Psion have an IR link)

    (The astute will note that any GSM phone can be used for the last 2 although having a proper keyboard & screen makes it soooo much nicer)

    HOWEVER (you knew that was coming, didn't you?) it all comes back to bandwidth. Oh, and cost.

    GSM data rate is 9.6KBit/Sec. That's it, no more. It also costs upwards of 10p/minute to use (erm.. 16 of your American Cents, I believe). Checking my e-mail therefore takes about 5 minutes and costs 50 English pennies (around 80 cents).

    Now, I'm not without my means, but you certainly can't call that mass-market web-on-the-go, wired for the next century technology, or rather you can but not at that cost.

    So my take is that until we see some network technology that has some bandwidth AND is cheap to use (I await responses telling me how much better life is in other countries here), you can forget pervasive mobile telecoms.

    The sermon:

    The lord already gaveth the Palmtop, the Handheld OSes, and the Mobile Phone. But he giveth not the connectivity unto thine 'net.

    --
    The Rev. henley MPhil(Oxon) (Barking)

  • Certainly WinCE looks poorer by the minute in the PDA market. And despite M$'s desire to dive into the telecoms market, there's no evidence yet of any influence there.

    But there are some other consumer appliances that WinCE is aimed at - there is a Clarion ICE system based on it, and there are / have been some set-top-boxes. Both of these have the potential to be attractive to Windows users, and perhaps WinCE has less disadvantages in these higher-cost, higher-power applications than it has in low-power PDAs and telephones.

    What's WinCE's progress in these areas ? Is it failing there too ?

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