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Its funny that this was posted now. I'm a software engineer for Motorola. We just had "Motocoder" day this week. They had a bunch of presentations about how "the customer" can develop BREW and J2ME apps for our phones.

I didn't go because I hate Java and I'm not really a fan of the T720 either. I'd rather that you went out and bought my product -- a C33x from Cingular or T-Mobile. It doesn't have J2ME yet, though. But, that's one of the reasons it isn't so expensive...

Anyway, if you were interested, you could check out Motorola's official information about developing apps.

Its funny that this was posted now. I'm a software engineer for Motorola. We just had "Motocoder" day this week. They had a bunch of presentations about how "the customer" can develop BREW and J2ME apps for our phones.

I didn't go because I hate Java and I'm not really a fan of the T720 either. I'd rather that you went out and bought my product -- a C33x from Cingular or T-Mobile. It doesn't have J2ME yet, though. But, that's one of the reasons it isn't so expensive...

Anyway, if you were interested, you could check out Motorola's official information about developing apps.

comcast could always deploy a replacement for the garbage digital boxes that we are forced to use

Gimme a break already. This is too funny. Cable companies are busy trying to scare the PVR companies because they're afraid people will record and (with Replay) share TV shows? But here's the best thing of all - they've expressed interest in having PVR technology embedded inside cable boxes and so one of the top suppliers of cable boxes has now designed a line of such devices. So if TiVo behaves, then they get more business from Motorola. But if they misbehave, then the cable ops dump Motorola and find someone else to play their stooge. Once PVR technology is standard in set top cable/satellite boxes, this thread will be moot particularly when the video signal will be encrypted all the way up to the tube/plasma/LCD.

Motorola has a digital cable, surround sound receiver, dvd player, etc. all-in-one box coming out (or already out). The Motorola DCP501 is the perfect solution for most people in an apartment or duplex that want all the goodies but don't have the room for all the pieces. I can't wait to buy/rent one -- soon as Mediacom starts supporting DD5.1 in my area.

What ones have you seen? As I said, I've never seen a Java-based phone that prevents developers from loading their own apps.

You can get the LG 5350, Samsung SPH-A500, Samsung SPH-N400, Sanyo 4900, and Sanyo 5300 through Sprint PCS. There's a developer program at developer.sprintpcs.com.

You can get the Motorola i85s, i50sx, i55sr, i80s, i90c, and i95cl through Nextel. There are developer programs from Nextel and Motorola.

You can get the RIM BlackBerry 5810 from AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile. RIM has a developer's site with an SDK and simulator.

the motorolla i90c is.

it's a nextel phone.

-eek

You don't know what you're talking about. The G4 does NOT have three floating-point units. (hint: an integer unit doesn't do floating-point)

If you don't believe me, you might at least believe Motorola

Or, check out a summary.

This is the kind of gear I consider essential. Except I don't go for the pda thing - I would rather use a dead tree pad and use the laptop when I want (full) computer functionality.

I work during the day and go to school at night, so I have reverted to using a backpack for my textbooks. In it, I also carry:

checkbook, pens, mechanical pencils, eraser, stamps, toothpaste, toothbrush, miniature philips screwdriver, business card holder, notepad, hand towel, batteries, Olympus digital voice recorder, cell phone, pager and the laptop is in my trunk if I need it :)

I don't understand how this is news for a number of reasons:

1> The math behind antenna design theory leaves little room for innovation. Two things determine how far your single is going to go a)the output power and b) the efficiency of your antenna. I don't see where this antenna design is any more efficient than many that are already on the market.. which leads me to..

2> There are already products on the market that can push WiFi signals well over 4 miles. Check out Motorola Canopy for their solution (it's geared more towards commercial enterprises, but for $2500 for an AP and two subscriber units, you can start a long-range WISP on pocket-change). Then there's companies like YDI, Wireless Central, and Tranzeo Wireless all selling long-range 802.11 products for cheap.

They might as well be putting out a press release saying they've invented a circular device that they're calling a "wheel".

• Nokia 6650
• Sony Ericsson T68i
• Motorola Timeport 270c

Motorola makes a couple of PowerPC based microcontrollers. These come with a number of usefull peripherals (USB endpoints, ethernet interfaces, serial ports, parallel I/O ports, etc.), some RAM and some EPROM all on a single chip. In decades past, Steve Ciarcia built a small publishing empire on the practice of building homebrew personal computers on similar microcontrollers (Z80 variants, in his case). The same approach could be used today. If you don't want to use a PowerPC, there are similar beasts available based on other popular architectures.

Motorola makes a couple of PowerPC based microcontrollers. These come with a number of usefull peripherals (USB endpoints, ethernet interfaces, serial ports, parallel I/O ports, etc.), some RAM and some EPROM all on a single chip. In decades past, Steve Ciarcia built a small publishing empire on the practice of building homebrew personal computers on similar microcontrollers (Z80 variants, in his case). The same approach could be used today. If you don't want to use a PowerPC, there are similar beasts available based on other popular architectures.

Motorola makes a couple of PowerPC based microcontrollers. These come with a number of usefull peripherals (USB endpoints, ethernet interfaces, serial ports, parallel I/O ports, etc.), some RAM and some EPROM all on a single chip. In decades past, Steve Ciarcia built a small publishing empire on the practice of building homebrew personal computers on similar microcontrollers (Z80 variants, in his case). The same approach could be used today. If you don't want to use a PowerPC, there are similar beasts available based on other popular architectures.

Motorola makes reference motherboards and pre-built systems based on them. You can run MontaVista Linux on them. There's a dual-1GHz model available.

I haven't tried it myself. I suspect it's not cheaper than buying a Mac.

If you really want to build a system from parts there are several places you can go. Motorola sells evaluation platforms that consisto of a motherboard (essentially a backplane) and CPU modules that plug into it. It's calld Sandpoint. You can get third party CPU modules for it from Tundra (who also sells whole kits with their own system board). Marvell/Galileo sells a platform that is well suited to building a PC style machine with PPC hardware, and you can get a variety of processor cards for it ranging from low end G3 style processors up to dual 7450 processors.

Some of the best PPC machines available right now can't be built from parts simply because they're on a single board. My current to y is the cyclades TS-100 it's only 1"x3"x3", has dual CPUs and can be had for under $200.

Wrong.

Cell phones can transmit at +30 dBm (= 1000 mW). 100 cell phones in the cabin would generate 100 W. Not much, if it's spread over the whole cabin volume, but if cavity resonances or multiple reflections create hot spots, it could be a problem.

What was left to me was AOL, so I signed up for that 1025 hours, and then did some shopping around online for another internet provider... I eventually ended up with a wireless internet service provider that uses the Motorola Canopy system, which gives me sustained performance comparable to a decent cable or DSL service, plus even more nice things like static IP and RDNS allocation.

Needlessly to say, then it was "Goodbye, AOL!" ... "The call" was pretty funny to me, since I had (ab)used their service to leap to a competitor. The rep on the other end tried in vain to convince me to keep my AOL account, and even tried to use the argument that "a dynamic ip is good because it's more secure." I got tired in the end and basically told him to cut the crap and just cancel my account.

Where do you get twice the speed? Do you mean twice the _clock speed_? Clock speeds really, really, absolutley, do not determine speed or performance.
>>>>>
CPU Performance = IPC * Clocks_Per_Sec.
Clock speed is fully one half of the performance equation, no matter what Apple tells you. It's a simple multiplication. If you can get twice the IPC running the same code, then you can beat a 2x clock speed disadvantage. If you can't (and a G4 can't) you can't. (Note, this is CPU performance only. It's the system designer's responsibility to surround a fast CPU with good memory subsystems, which AMD and Intel do, and so far Apple does not).

Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply?
>>>>
Did you know that the G4+ takes 7 clock cycles to do the same? Actually, both are simplifications. Actual instruction latency charts are published on both Motorola's and Intel's website, I suggest you read them. Yes, it takes a P4 around 20 clocks to do one multiply. If you're doing one multiply per program, then a P4 will be a lot slower. But thanks to something called pipelining (read about it, try ArsTechnica) a P4 can have 20 multiply instructions "in the pipe" at once while a G4 can have 7 "in the pipe" at once.

You can chop up your instructions as much as you want, and increase the clock to hell, but not change performance at all.
>>>>>>>>
Um, a P4 at 100 GHz, even if it took 20 clocks per multiply would get about 5 billion multiplies per second. A G4 at 1 GHz, even if it took 1 clock per multiply, could only get 1 billion per second. Clock speed does matter. In fact, it's a linear factor!

The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions.
>>>>>>>
I think you mean "RISC" chip.

It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
>>>>>>
Actually, a G4 has 32 general purpose integer registers, and 16 rename registers (48 total) while the P4 has 8 general purpose integer registers mapped to 128 entry internal register file (128 total). The G4 has the advantage of more registers directly visible to the compiler, but that's a code optimization issue, not so much a data storage issue.

Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
>>>>>>
Not quite that much. Again, I suggest you read some actual timings :)

But to use those coprocessors,
>>>>
x86 FPUs have been integrated since the 486. The MMX and SSE/SSE2 units have always been integrated. They are just another execution unit, like the integer or AGR units.

you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
>>>>>
Nobody uses MMX anymore :) The FPU instruction set isn't "bolted-on" an is fully independent of the integer unit. The SSE/SSE2 units are also fully independent. Of course, that's the external appearence. The internal execution units of the processor look different, even in a G4. The Altivec unit is actually 5 totally different units, while the P4 FPU and SSE units are actually one integrated unit. Of course, these are implementation details that don't really make a difference unless you're doing multiple types of floating point operations at once. In the common case of doing a bunch of the same operation on a bunch of data, they're equivilent.

For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not.
>>>>
But what if you have a 64-bit x86? What'll happen then? Ah, my reality is being distorted! My puny mind... my puny mind!

Really, so if G5 is Apple's branding and free for them to use, then why does this PDF from Motorola on Motorola's site describing Motorola's processor roadmap have the G5 name?

Nod, I know Motorola does this with donated old cell phones.

I don't think that I did prove your point though, all I said was that Intel's offering was selling for less; acquisition price as you noted, and performing comparably. Actually I was just repeating the comments made by the post you replied to. I have no hard data about what their actual costs to manufacture an Itanium are, nor did I post any. I'll go along, however, and speculate that they're not recouping their R&D costs at the moment, but are instead hoping that lower costs will mean larger acceptance. If dumping is illegal in domestic trade I'm sure Intel is selling just at or above actual costs of manufacture. And yes, it is rather doubtless that their strong presence in the PC market is helping to keep their business afloat, along with the networking division and whereever else Intel has diversified to. However, Intel isn't a monopoly on the desktop. A little over a week ago AMD anounced it has about 19% market share. Here's a read about it. That doesn't count the people using Macs or older Sun's or SGI's or anything, though that is a pretty small portion. Just because it's their architecture that has a monopoly on the PC market doesn't mean that they have a monopoly. Had you made the assertion before the Athlon, however, I would have been quite inclined to agree.

This proves you know little...
See, now you have to go and be a jerk. I hadn't read about VLIW, and thus EPIC's compiler optimizations not carrying forward generations. A simple pointing it out would have sufficed. If you could supply a link with detail I would appreciate it. The best I've found is that because of heavy compile time optimization future EPIC processors may run the code essentially the same since the number of functional units the code was compiled for remains the same in the compiled code. And while a recompile would make it all better, I too would rather have it just work with a new processor.
It'll still run older code though and it doesn't sound like they're changing the ISA in a way that would break it with their next Itanium. That was the basis of my statement.

I'm actually kinda upset that we're going to see only one more Alpha. I wish DEC and then Compaq would have done something about marketing or anything to keep the things around. Why Intel, upon aquiring a lot of the talent that went into Alpha, isn't going to do more to further what the Alpha had going is beyond me. Intel would have a hell of an offering if they extended the Alpha.

And why EPIC indeed. The performance of the Itanium shows that it isn't a total flop, despite whatever issues about size/heat/actual cost are brought up. I don't think that at this stage you can classify the Itanium line as inferior. The performance is on par and we've yet to really see how it scales. If, when Itanium 2 has gone though its rigors, I hear that there are a whole slew of problems and performance is going nowhere I'll be the next to say that there are problems with the architechture. I'm not about to discount it on the basis of size, heat, or potential issues. Of course, I'd probably wait to see if I were thinking about buying one too.

Lastly again I'm not sure about the power of the IA-32 deal. I'm no EE, but looking around at Intel's and Motorola's pages I see the Pentium 4 with a core voltage no higher than 1.75V and the G4 fixed at 1.8V. From personal experience I've run a dual Pentium 3 with two hard drives, two cd drives, two floppies, and a decently powered video card off of a 235W power supply. My 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 has a 300W power supply and is perfectly happy. I couldn't find a smaller one, and I'm not sure if it needs that kind of power either. Comparably I did a little poking around and the G4 cube uses a modest 205W power supply (part 611-0150) and I found a G4 power supply (part 661-2303) that's a 235W piece. From the images, however, that one didn't appear to have the ability to run many drives off of it. So while the numbers are smaller I'm not sure I'd call it absurd to have a machine as powerful as the IA-32 line with power requirements at least in the neighborhood of where Apple's are. Heck, Apple doesn't post much information about what is used where, so I'm not sure the newer, comparable G4's can even use the 235W power supply either. I would say from my experience that most of the older G4 models were comparable in performance to my dual Pentium 3 machine. The cubes I've used always seemed slower.

with the Dragonball chip

And FPGA compatible x86 would not be a very compelling product. You could emulate it in software on another CPU (not involved in the Palladium deal) much faster

That leaves us with... Motorola 68000, so are you saying that x86 emulation on a Motorolla 68000 will be faster than an x86 FPGA?

Motorla v70

With VibraCall alert!

(it's a walkie-talkie)

It is just for that reason that I'm pushing for housing developments in my small rural town. I have no options for broadband, so my only hope is a population increase to bring the attention towards us. I do like the small town feeling, but broadband is essential.

The demographics for my town are upper-middle class folk who work for hi-tech firms, such as Intel, HP, and Oracle, but unless you live in suburbia, you're out of options.

The quality of the SBC phone lines equate to galvanized barbed wire. Dialup sucks, ISDN is ultra-pricey, but pennys compared to a T1 drop. With all the trees and hills, wireless is not an option. And with the distance between houses, a meshed wireless network won't work either. Last-mile is a huge problem for me and many Americans.

If anyone else has other ideas on how I can get broadband, It'd be much appreciated.

that makes cell phones?

Everybody has mentioned Sony and (sp) Eriksson, but even if there was a chance in hell of this kind of product getting sold, I don't think they'd buy from either of those two. (Apple isn't selling its own PDA because the market is saturated and no one is making money. The cellular handset market is 10 thousand times worse, so don't look for this any time soon. Eriksson might make a likely partner, but longterm Sony is a major competitor in the digital-lifestyle space, so I don't see them going there. Eriksson or Nokia, maybe.)

Who does Apple know that makes phones? A company established in the cellular industry, maybe down on its luck in recent years, looking for a breakthrough product? Maybe one that sells things like phones and has been getting good press lately for Bluetooth gear seeing as how Apple loves Bluetooth. If oonly there was a company that Apple already had a relationship with, then we'd know who they might go to for this sort of thing.

If only I could think of a company like that...

that makes cell phones?

Everybody has mentioned Sony and (sp) Eriksson, but even if there was a chance in hell of this kind of product getting sold, I don't think they'd buy from either of those two. (Apple isn't selling its own PDA because the market is saturated and no one is making money. The cellular handset market is 10 thousand times worse, so don't look for this any time soon. Eriksson might make a likely partner, but longterm Sony is a major competitor in the digital-lifestyle space, so I don't see them going there. Eriksson or Nokia, maybe.)

Who does Apple know that makes phones? A company established in the cellular industry, maybe down on its luck in recent years, looking for a breakthrough product? Maybe one that sells things like phones and has been getting good press lately for Bluetooth gear seeing as how Apple loves Bluetooth. If oonly there was a company that Apple already had a relationship with, then we'd know who they might go to for this sort of thing.

If only I could think of a company like that...

How long will it be before employers start complaining that their UW co-op students don't know Linux or Java and can't work with non-Intel architectures? probably pretty long, seeing as E&CE already has tons of money invested Sun hardware (servers & workstations), Motorola hardware (Coldfire development boards), and Altera hardware for embedded systems development. Furthermore, Java is used for teaching purposes (and don't spout off FUD about how MS .NET will replace it) and I'm pretty sure Linux has a pretty good following in the area.

Although used in Macs, the PowerPC chip probably shouldn't be called "Mac technology."

Most chips using this architecture are used for embedded applications.

I think that The "we make shit up" Register started the G5 64bit rumour.

Actually, I think it's Motorola that made up this rumor, seeing as their publiclly available roadmap shows the G5 with 64-bit support. See this page on their website. Seems like a fairly natural progression of the Gx line, with the next version being the G5 with "32 and 64 bit products, backwards compatibility".

The Register may have blown this out of proportion (they've been known to do that on MANY occasions), but it looks like this time they at least had a tiny smattering of facts to back them up.

It's also interesting that they are doing this in New York. I thought all chip manufacturing was done overseas, where labor is cheaper. Perhaps IBM is getting some sort of government subsidy for creating American jobs. Or maybe New York has a good supply of chipmakers already, so they can find more skilled workers.

There is a GPS system available for download. Of course you need to pay for it (one time fee) and have a more costly "Network Aware" subscription plan...but if you need it its there

Motorola i95cl

General Features

* Color Display
* Voice Recorder
* Speakerphone
* Voice Activation
* Multi-Language Support
* Time & Date Display
* SIM Card Operation
* Custom Styles Settings
* Pre-Installed Software Applications
* JAVA(TM) 2 Micro Edition Capable**

SLIM BATTERY: 19g, up to 2h talk time, up to 45h standby

EXTENDED BATTERY: 33g, up to 3.33h talk time, up to 75 standby.

(hmmm ... battery life seems to be its most apparent weakness. My LG VX1 / TM-520 is rated at 180 min talk / 110h standby from the standard battery.)***

Digital Cellular Phone Service

* Voice Activated Dialing
* 250 Entry Phonebook
* Quickstore Phone Numbers
* Last 20 Recent Call List*
* Turbo Dial® one-touch dialing
* VibraCall® alert

Digital Two-Way Radio

* One-Touch Private & Group Call
* Quickstore Private IDs
* Built-In Speaker

Message Service

* Consolidated In-Box Storage
* Voice & Message Mail Indicators
* Time & Date Stamp*

Data Capable*

* Software Download Capability
* Internet Access Services
* T9® Text Input for Fast Entry

Performance Specifications

* Dimensions: 90mm X 50mm X 28mm with Slim Battery
* Weight: 154.4g
* Power 600mW typical
* Frequency Range:
Tx 806 - 825 Mhz/Rx 851-870 Mhz
* Channel Spacing: 25 kHz
* Channel Access: TDMA
* Operating Temperature: -10C to + 60C
* Storage Temperature (Radio Only): -40C to + 85C

Specifications are typical and subject to change.

* Network and subscription dependent feature not available in all areas.
** Visit www.motorola.com/idenupdate for a list of downloadable software applications.
*** I was not paid by LG to type that :-)

.... from four months ago...

Motorola's i95cl Press Release

- HeXa

Call me crazy, but didn't they already have this 'technology' about 60 years ago? Every episode of M*A*S*H has either Radar or Klinger cranking up a radio before calling Sparky.

That was probably a field phone, not a radio. The crank would've rung the phone at the other end of the line.

And by 'they', I do specifically mean Motorola. Wasn't their start in making walkie-talkie's and other military communications equipment like this wind-up radio?

http://www.motorola.com/content/1,1037,115-110,00. html

Their first product was a battery eliminator to enable a radio to run on AC instead of the three batteries (filament, plate, and bias) they previously needed. After that, they got into car radios, which is where they got their name.

I should have used preview.... Check out Sugarloaf.net they are providing wireless broadband to a location not served by other means.... Also, you might want to check out Motorola Canopy for the wireless hardware.

Here's the page for the Motorola MPC8540 -- the first implementation of the commonly called G5 chip.

G5 seems to be a term that only Apple uses (maybe IBM, too?); Motorola calls this the first implementation of "the e500 high performance core [which] implements the enhanced PowerPC Book E instruction set architecture". They also call it a PowerQUICC communication processor; I suspect they have no shortage of names.

I've been drooling over this chip for a while - RapidIO bus interface, dual 10/100/gigabit ethernet controllers built in, DDR memory controller with ECC, PCI-X... It's got enough stuff to make a great laptop, but is meant more for embedded applications.

According to Motorola site, Canopy is a low-cost solution (if compared to 802.11) to deploy a wireless broadband ISP. No license needed, it operates on 5.25-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.825 GHz. 10 Mbps, 2 miles Multipoint, 20 miles P2P. Somewhere (not on Motorola site) I've read of $30.000 for a starter kit that supports up to 200 users.

According to Motorola site, Canopy is a low-cost solution (if compared to 802.11) to deploy a wireless broadband ISP. No license needed, it operates on 5.25-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.825 GHz. 10 Mbps, 2 miles Multipoint, 20 miles P2P. Somewhere (not on Motorola site) I've read of $30.000 for a starter kit that supports up to 200 users.

This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. WiFi is expensive, and hardware to put the WiFi in is expensive. FRS Radios, on the other hand, are cheaper individually than WiFi equipment, work on UHF, and have a much wider range of features, not to mention being designed for this sort of thing. Really, it's a great idea to go with. Cheaper, less clunky, better range, better signal quality, batteries last longer, easier to set up, and so on. Check it out.

--Dan

I have done this already, having built a USB controlled robotic webcam mount for senior project. It has an internal USB hub too, so it doesn't take up any extra USB ports. Just plug it in, plug the camera into the base, and you're ready to go.

It took several months of head-scratching to get this to work. I used Motorola's MC68HC908JB8 USB 1.1 microcontroller, and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to build a low-speed device. Even at low speed, you can transfer data over 64kbps, so it's pretty useful for a wide range of control applications. It has a good in-circuit serial programming interface, and the development tools from PEMicro are excellent and free.

The route I suggest, and the one I eventually took, is to program the device to enumerate as HID-compliant hardware. This makes things vastly simpler, since Windows has built-in drivers for HID devices, and with a little tweaking you can pipe as much data back and forth as you want. It took me a week of evening work, and a solid 24-hour coding spree before I got two-way communication working correctly, but after that everything was a breeze. If you want your device to be compatible with Windows 95, you need to keep it USB 1.0 compatible, which means just Endpoint 0 and Endpoint 1. You have to tunnel data to the device through control transfers, which after you figure it out, becomes mostly transparent to the rest of your program.

I like the 908JB8 because it's Motorola, has 8k of Flash, and costs a couple bucks. The surface-mount profile is big enough so that you can solder it without huge headaches. You can get these chips from Digikey.

Using the HID method also opens up some cool possibilities. Just by changing a few identification numbers, you can make the device into a mouse, keyboard, joystick, volume control, or other recognized HID devices. It would be pretty simple to take a MC68HC908JB8 and turn it into a custom joystick with 50 buttons, or flight yoke or some other crazy peripheral. The hardest part would the mechanics, unless your good at that sort of thing.

If you want a high-speed device, you are in for a few more headaches, but nothing impossible for you wizard coders out there (I accomplished what I needed to with zero training in assembly or C++). Definitely go with the Cypress chips, they are widely documented and have lots of great features. I've even seen that some of their hub controllers have microcontrollers that you can program as well.

Highly recommended book: USB Complete by Jan Axelson. This book will be infinitely useful to anyone who wants to program USB devices. Also check out the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup. Jan posts there are lot, as well as many others knowledgable in the field.

There isn't much documentation out there on the MC68HC908JB8, but for anyone who wants to see what I've worked on, shoot me an email at garrett.r.mace@rose-hulman.edu.

Have fun!

Games on wireless phones have been around for quite a while already. I'm not talking about snake or tic tac toe, but golf, motorcycle games, bowling, wrestling, etc. Sun's J2ME has been providing this technology on Nextel phones since March of 2001.

If you check out the games section of the iDEN Update Application Catalog you can see that many, many games can be downloaded to your phone today.

Now, graphically, these are nice. They will become compelling when Nextel releases it's next phone, the i95cl (press release here) which we should expect within the next 1-2 months. The primary benefit of the new phone being not only the color screen, but the ability to store many more applications through memory improvements as well as processor speed improvements.

I have seen GPS enabled multiplayer games in the works, and many other cool things to come from the Nextel developer community. If you are a developer, please check out the Nextel Developer Program and Motorola's iDEN Developer Program. Both sites have free registration, resources, and special pricing on some equipment for developers. Both also have procedures to establish co-marketing relationships.

Games on wireless phones have been around for quite a while already. I'm not talking about snake or tic tac toe, but golf, motorcycle games, bowling, wrestling, etc. Sun's J2ME has been providing this technology on Nextel phones since March of 2001.

If you check out the games section of the iDEN Update Application Catalog you can see that many, many games can be downloaded to your phone today.

Now, graphically, these are nice. They will become compelling when Nextel releases it's next phone, the i95cl (press release here) which we should expect within the next 1-2 months. The primary benefit of the new phone being not only the color screen, but the ability to store many more applications through memory improvements as well as processor speed improvements.

I have seen GPS enabled multiplayer games in the works, and many other cool things to come from the Nextel developer community. If you are a developer, please check out the Nextel Developer Program and Motorola's iDEN Developer Program. Both sites have free registration, resources, and special pricing on some equipment for developers. Both also have procedures to establish co-marketing relationships.

Games on wireless phones have been around for quite a while already. I'm not talking about snake or tic tac toe, but golf, motorcycle games, bowling, wrestling, etc. Sun's J2ME has been providing this technology on Nextel phones since March of 2001.

If you check out the games section of the iDEN Update Application Catalog you can see that many, many games can be downloaded to your phone today.

Now, graphically, these are nice. They will become compelling when Nextel releases it's next phone, the i95cl (press release here) which we should expect within the next 1-2 months. The primary benefit of the new phone being not only the color screen, but the ability to store many more applications through memory improvements as well as processor speed improvements.

I have seen GPS enabled multiplayer games in the works, and many other cool things to come from the Nextel developer community. If you are a developer, please check out the Nextel Developer Program and Motorola's iDEN Developer Program. Both sites have free registration, resources, and special pricing on some equipment for developers. Both also have procedures to establish co-marketing relationships.

Games on wireless phones have been around for quite a while already. I'm not talking about snake or tic tac toe, but golf, motorcycle games, bowling, wrestling, etc. Sun's J2ME has been providing this technology on Nextel phones since March of 2001.

If you check out the games section of the iDEN Update Application Catalog you can see that many, many games can be downloaded to your phone today.

Now, graphically, these are nice. They will become compelling when Nextel releases it's next phone, the i95cl (press release here) which we should expect within the next 1-2 months. The primary benefit of the new phone being not only the color screen, but the ability to store many more applications through memory improvements as well as processor speed improvements.

I have seen GPS enabled multiplayer games in the works, and many other cool things to come from the Nextel developer community. If you are a developer, please check out the Nextel Developer Program and Motorola's iDEN Developer Program. Both sites have free registration, resources, and special pricing on some equipment for developers. Both also have procedures to establish co-marketing relationships.

I always thought it'd be nice to have two physical devices, possibly connected to the same service and same rate plan. I'd love to just use my cellphone for talking on, and using something with a regular QWERTY keyboard for typing (like Motorola's Vbox).

I'd really like to get a Vbox to do messaging with, but I wouldn't want to use it for a phone. I have a phone (V60), but it's awkward to do messaging with (even with T9). Of course if I did get both, I'd have to pay for both! No thanks!

Geeks who are still using so-called "multi-tap" input should be ashamed of themselves. Dictionary based methods, T9 (from Tegic/AOL), and iTap (Motorola's equivalent) have been standard on phones for a couple of years now, even if they do have their short-comings.

If you're not into the legacy layout* you could go with MessagEase or this new thing, but the smart money is on a company called Eatoni, since they have two products (LetterWise and WordWise) which they back up with a big stack of research. There's also Zi Corp. who make eZiText and eZiTap for SMS input.

If you're interested in the HCI aspect of all this you could do worse than looking at the work of I Scott Mackenzie, Poika Isokoski or Mark Dunlop.

* 1-800-GOFEDEX anyone? Probably explains why Europe is ahead of the US in this field. That and our ridiculous txt addctn...