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I mean, sure, it depends what field you're in. For example, GPL-ing Java certainly helps Sun's competitors -- I guess in theory, some wicked-cool feature of Java can now be ported to Mono.

However, take something like Drupal. Pretty much any company implementing Drupal (or another open-source CMS) on their website is going to have to write some custom modules, or at least a custom theme. If they release their modules back to the community, so what?

For example: I used to work here. They are starting to use Drupal in places, and one thing I was planning to do (which never got finished) was create an easy way to take their Word documents (very well-styled, well-formatted Word documents) and convert them into HTML, for use in Drupal, via FCKEditor.

Now, if you've seen their homepage, you can see very clearly that they are in the magazine business, and the blogging/ranting business. I suppose, in theory, they have competition, who might theoretically benefit from any changes they made. But I was told, in very simple terms, that I could GPL and release whatever the hell I wanted. It's their content that's valuable to them; they were only paying for me to develop software because there wasn't any out there that did what they wanted.

If I help their competition run their website, it really doesn't matter at all to them.

Of course, if I licensed some of their articles under Creative Commons, it would kill them.

I started with a Palm III and then went to the Palm VII (it was free). Nice, easy-to-use PDAs but that's about it. So, I gave the Pocket PC a try.

I used to even be a reviewer for Pocket PC Thoughts. After 2 Pocket PCs and a couple of years, I gave up. I got tired of always carrying a device around. I also don't make enough money to keep up with the latest trends.

Honestly, have you looked at the prices of Pocket PCs and Palms lately? Ridiculous! Besides, I sit at a PC all day at work, why would I want to surf the web on a 4 inch screen? It also gets tough to sit back and watch new and better software come out that I can't use. Hardware is even worse. I tried a Bluetooth GPS receiver. What a pain. I sold it and bought a handheld Garmin which I love.

So, for me, apathy won out.

• 4 GB storage
• 18 hours battery life

• 64MB SDRAM/64MB Flash memory
• 8 hours 43 minutes battery life

• 20GB storage
• 12 hours battery life

You people may be interested in PocketPC Thoughts' coverage of Apple "real" entry into the PDA market, the iPoc.

I posted about this on PocketPC Thought about three weeks ago. You can see screen captures there and there's a link to the new version 0.003 (which I can't get to work on my axim v50x) as well...

Why? Because I Can!

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.p hp?t=7144&

• AximSite - Axim X50V
• PocketNow - Axim X50 & X50v
• infoSync - Axim X50v
• infoSync - Axim X50 Advanced
• infoSync - Axim X50 Standard
• PDA Buyers Guide - Axim X50v
• Read - Brighthand - Axim X50v
• CNET - Axim X50v
• Pocket PC Thoughts - Axim X50
• BargainPDA - Axim X50 & X50v
• Geek.com - Axim X50 & X50v

The new Sony CLIE PEG-VZ90 has a 480×320x16b OLED display. Available in Japan only, at present. A bigger picture and some news links here.

The U50 and U70 are $2199 and $2699 respectively. The OQO will be "just under $2000". The Flipstart price hasn't been announced yet, but I'd be surprised if it will be much cheaper. These things will remain rich men's toys for the forseeable future.

The OQO is going to cost around $2000, and I doubt the Sony and the Flipstart will be much cheaper.

Sorry folks, it's a Pocket PC future for you ;)

Ive been holding off upgrading my 19 inch CRT hoping someone would come out with an OLED monitor. I'm seeing OLED displays in more and more things, so was hoping they had the blue lifetime thing licked...or at least improved.

Unfortunatly my CRT is now failing on me. I think it just might be a loose colour wire (monitor changing colours) so I'm going to poke around to check it out--no warnings about high voltages please, I know what I'm doing--. OLED monitors still seem fairly far away dispite some existing prototypes, but I am really hoping they come out soon.

I want to go flat panel but am very dissatisfied with LCD's economical and technical shortcomings. They have fairly poor contrast, only newly getting the viewing angle thing fixed, have a best possible response time(16ms) thats only barely good enough for a 60fps game (and thats a full on/off transition..transitions to/from partial states take much longer)...and to top it all off are friggin expensive compared to their nicer (bigger) CRT brothers.

SO, I'm holding out for OLED, but it seems I might be holding out for a few years before seeing a decent sized flat panel display based on this technology.

Timothy on a Saturday night

This was covered not too long ago on PocketPC Thoughts:
link

It is a multimodal browser, which means it supports VoiceXML basically.

Opera is making one, and so is NetFront (a PPC browser)

Pocket PC Thoughts - great site maintained by Jason Dunn and team.

Ok, for one, this isnt LCD. It is E-Ink that everyone has probably heard about. LCD doesnt work by brirng black or white particles to the fore.

For two, instead of some 4Hz, two color rollable (not foldable) thing, why wouldnt you want to look at full color, super thin, high refresh rate OLEDs ?

Here is a picture of a OLED monitor..kind of makes lcd look chunkey hey?

Oleds are of course also flexible.

There are people who have explained OLED, etc.

But even with all the explanations on how much better than LCD it is, its hard without at least a picture. Here is that picture. It was taken at the CES trade show.

WARNING: looking at this picture may make you realize how crappy your LCD monitor really is and what you have settled for:

Ta da!

It really shows the drawbacks of LCD's viewing angle and thickness because of backlighting. In the board the picture taker explains he has seen solid colour on this monitor there (demo running i guess) and the picture was perfectly even.

Anyways, thought i'd share! Enjoy.

In its current state, LCD seems to be a horrible technology. I go to futureshop or its equivelant and look at the flat screen lcd tvs. There is a dvd playing on it, but it looks fuggin terrible.

LCD monitors generally have less viewing quality, and of course the horrible response time, bad viewing angle, poor contrast, and fixed resolution. I havent seen that many desks that were in such dire need of desk space that they needed to settle for LCD. A guy will buy a lcd tv or monitor and tell himself that the ghosting really isnt thaaat bad, or the viewing angle doesnt bother him thaaat much. These people are just fooling themselves because LCD is really the only real flatscreen tech on the market right now.

I believe when OLEDs hit the market LCD will pretty much be useless obslete technology. OLED has a fixed resolution, true, but suffers from none of the other disadvantages.

Look at this picture.

After seeing something that amazing from a prototype, i really dont see a future for LCD in the computing world. Maybe somewhere in the embedded arena where a non-backlit LCD would suffice, but other than that, where?

Plus if these things hit 40-60 inches..that pretty much boots plasma out the door too.

I am only worried that since OLED will junk such a big area of displays, manufactuerers will be hesitant to deploy it, or will deploy it expensively and with low supply. The good thing is i guess it only takes one company to do it right, and the prices will come crashing down.

I guess as long as the manufacturers dont jack the prices up too much, i dont see a barrier to wide spread acceptance.

Regardless of what Sony would have me do, I will replace my trusty 19" CRT only when a display with OLED technology become available at a reasonable price-point.

Vibrant colour, excellent resolution, quick refresh, cheap to manufacture and makes an LCD look chunky. Sony just wants to make money off LCD before OLED comes along and forces them to write off their LCD investments.

How can Microsoft/Compaq get away with that?

Microsoft licensed Xerox's technology for the Block Recogniser, which is the one that works like Graffiti.

That's not actually true. Despite having the Microsoft brands ("Word," "Excel," etc.) on the Pocket Office apps, the office suites for PalmOS are more compatible with MS Office on the desktop. It's a sore spot among the PocketPC faithful that the Pocket Office apps chew up some file formatting during "round-tripping" - synching a file, modifying it on the PPC, and sending it back to the desktop app.

Check out this PocketPCThoughts article for some schadenfreude.

And here's a comparison of PDA office suites at Brighthand.

Try the Viewsonic V35. It's the thinnest Pocket PC available, and seems to be on par with Palm thickness wise.

Check out the preview on Pocket PC Thoughts for more info.

This is going to be a great year for competition. Just a year ago Pocket PC's had huge advantages in both hardware and software. Palm OS 4 devices were stuck using 16-bit Motorola processors that for the most part ran at 33MHz, while on the PPC the norm was a 200Mhz 32-bit StrongARM processor with around 20 times the MIPS. The PPC OS was multithreaded, the Palm OS was not. The normal PPC could run 320x240 full screen resolution; the majority of Palm models were running 160x160 with a hard graffiti area. About the only advantage Palm units had was battery life, and even that was being challenged by lithium-powered PPC units such as the iPAQ. A lot can change in a year.

Software is more equal now. OS 5 is a 32-bit, (from the 32-bit OS experience of 4 dozen former BeOS employees inherited by Palmsource), multithreaded, offers system-wide 128-bit encryption, SSL support, and has new multimedia video and audio APIs. It will run code on Intel, Motorola, and TI ARM-based processors, without recompiling thanks to translation layers. And it is lean; it can fit under 4 megs.

OS 5 also has a large advantage over PPC 2002 -- native support of the ARM V5 instruction set. The PPC 2002 OS does not, eliminating what could have been large performance increases. While the next PPC OS will undoubtedly rectify this, some analysts are predicting this may not be released until 2004. This is partly why the new XScale PPCs are not showing the speed improvements everyone was expecting over the older StrongARM PPCs. For some tasks, new PPCs actually run
slower.

Not upgrading the PPC OS to use V5 was a rational decision on Microsoft's part, as it would have made "obsolete all SA1110 iPAQ devices" and "strand[ed] an installed base of over 2 million iPAQ users", according to MS (same link above.) Palm in is a much better position. OS 5 only has to emulate the old Motorola code to run programs written exclusively for OS 4. While emulation usually slows things down considerably, the Motorola was *so* slow that the ARM V5 processors are actually running many apps faster than before (if marketing can be believed).

The Palm OS also has a huge advantage as it can already use the ARM V5's automatic clock and voltage throttling abilities. For example, if you run a CPU-intensive game the Xscale can run full-bore (200-400Mhz), while if you run your datebook it throttles back (say 50Mhz), conserving battery life. This function is so important the XScale was named after it (it "scales" itself). Current XScale PPC's don't seem able to do this little trick. (The ASUS MyPal PPC worked out a kludge for this -- a software control so you can throttle the processor manually -- and is promising a more elegant OS patch in future MyPal's to throttle automatically, "fixing" this part of the PPC 2002 OS.)

What about hardware? Well, both Palms and PPCs can now use basically the same hardware (and even vendors). ASUS is making both current PPCs and upcoming (1Q 2003) Palms. Palm OS 5 units have an advantage as they can use a varied range of ARM processors, and already some Palm OS units (like this Sony) have a higher resolution . The Ipaq is rumored to be going up to 480x320 next year, but we will have to wait and see.

Even though these particular Clieâ(TM)s are not my bag (too bulky), it wonâ(TM)t be long until the entire high-end Clie line is ported over to XScale, including the smaller form factor models.

This is going to be a great year for competition. Just a year ago Pocket PC's had huge advantages in both hardware and software. Palm OS 4 devices were stuck using 16-bit Motorola processors that for the most part ran at 33MHz, while on the PPC the norm was a 200Mhz 32-bit StrongARM processor with around 20 times the MIPS. The PPC OS was multithreaded, the Palm OS was not. The normal PPC could run 320x240 full screen resolution; the majority of Palm models were running 160x160 with a hard graffiti area. About the only advantage Palm units had was battery life, and even that was being challenged by lithium-powered PPC units such as the iPAQ. A lot can change in a year.

Software is more equal now. OS 5 is a 32-bit, (from the 32-bit OS experience of 4 dozen former BeOS employees inherited by Palmsource), multithreaded, offers system-wide 128-bit encryption, SSL support, and has new multimedia video and audio APIs. It will run code on Intel, Motorola, and TI ARM-based processors, without recompiling thanks to translation layers. And it is lean; it can fit under 4 megs.

OS 5 also has a large advantage over PPC 2002 -- native support of the ARM V5 instruction set. The PPC 2002 OS does not, eliminating what could have been large performance increases. While the next PPC OS will undoubtedly rectify this, some analysts are predicting this may not be released until 2004. This is partly why the new XScale PPCs are not showing the speed improvements everyone was expecting over the older StrongARM PPCs. For some tasks, new PPCs actually run
slower.

Not upgrading the PPC OS to use V5 was a rational decision on Microsoft's part, as it would have made "obsolete all SA1110 iPAQ devices" and "strand[ed] an installed base of over 2 million iPAQ users", according to MS (same link above.) Palm in is a much better position. OS 5 only has to emulate the old Motorola code to run programs written exclusively for OS 4. While emulation usually slows things down considerably, the Motorola was *so* slow that the ARM V5 processors are actually running many apps faster than before (if marketing can be believed).

The Palm OS also has a huge advantage as it can already use the ARM V5's automatic clock and voltage throttling abilities. For example, if you run a CPU-intensive game the Xscale can run full-bore (200-400Mhz), while if you run your datebook it throttles back (say 50Mhz), conserving battery life. This function is so important the XScale was named after it (it "scales" itself). Current XScale PPC's don't seem able to do this little trick. (The ASUS MyPal PPC worked out a kludge for this -- a software control so you can throttle the processor manually -- and is promising a more elegant OS patch in future MyPal's to throttle automatically, "fixing" this part of the PPC 2002 OS.)

What about hardware? Well, both Palms and PPCs can now use basically the same hardware (and even vendors). ASUS is making both current PPCs and upcoming (1Q 2003) Palms. Palm OS 5 units have an advantage as they can use a varied range of ARM processors, and already some Palm OS units (like this Sony) have a higher resolution . The Ipaq is rumored to be going up to 480x320 next year, but we will have to wait and see.

Even though these particular Clieâ(TM)s are not my bag (too bulky), it wonâ(TM)t be long until the entire high-end Clie line is ported over to XScale, including the smaller form factor models.

Forget about "analyzing" that stolen image. You should look at the ORIGINAL.

Sony has plenty of dirty tricks up their collective sleeve, as well.

For example, at this same show (CeBit), they were running a large screen demo of one of their Clie handhelds, showing how it could play fullscreen video, etc. They even had a little camera set up and pointed at a real Clie, giving the indication that what was on the big screen was being taken directly from the screen on the handheld.

Turns out, the big screen image didn't have anything to do with a real Clie screen. It was all faked.

Jenova_Six

Yeah, I heard Mazingo was good, just like that other person said. Pocket PC Thoughts, the premier news website for the Pocket PC, very much recommends it, especially after they told us that Avantgo was going to cut off access.

My favorite off of the hardware page is the Symbol PPT 2800, which has some impressive stats but also looks like a Star Trek prop as well..

On the other hand, the Casio E-200 seems to have expandability locked down with a Type II slot, a PC card slot and a memory slot.

For cool, the "O2 xpda" listed on the Pocket PC Thoughts homepage takes the prize. Jason Dunn says "I'm at a total loss here...who knows what this device is? Is this the BT device I've heard rumblings about?" I have a thought. I'd bet that this is related to MIT's Oxygen Project, profiled in this article from Scientific American.

Useful links (including screenshots)
Microsoft PocketPC 2002 Site
PocketPC Thoughts
Smaller.com
PocketPC Passion

The the Genio that was just mentioned...

Beats the HELL out of my Palm III...