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HP Jornada 560 Series
Blanche writes: "infoSync has got a photo and confirmed specifications for the new HP Jornada 560 series of handhelds, which will be the first PDA to be delivered with Pocket PC 2002 OS - also known as Merlin. On top of this; the savvy gadget are also rumored to be provided with speech-recognition technology."
Another thing to consider is that HP handelds are reasl guzzlers, a fact that is more important than most people realise.
One of the major reasons why I chose the Handspring was the fact that I can get up to a month between battery changes. THis means less chance of losing my data if I'm away from my home computer for a week or so. (The downside is that it uses AAA alkalines, so it's not as green as I'd like).
Unless HP, Casio and Microsoft address these issues, I'm sticking with Palm-based handhelds.
yeah, the only thing that I have ever found useful about voice recognition is when I'm typing a letter or something with a LOT of text, and even then it is almost faster to type it out by hand because you wind up with saying "scratch" every second word. Mind you, last time I've tried it was in the P200 days. But I was really excpecting it to be practically part of the OS by now, with this much computing power, why isn't it? Why isn't there any good voice recognition software out?
If God gave us curiosity
Did infoSync verify all specifications? And how thoroughly did they verify them?
I certainly hope market saturation never stops the company from bringing new tech on the market, and I certainly hope that they keep making your newest PDA "obsolete" (one of the oddest things in technology is when users cry foul over new products coming out: This is seen to the greatest extent in video cards where users yell that nvidia came out with a GeForce 3...no longer is their GeForce 2 Ultra the latest and great, and this offends their sensibilities).
Merlin is PocketPC 2002, hence it's the newest version of CE, hence it almost certainly has all the old apps and then some. The speech recognition is mostly a sham (just as it's a sham in Office XP: People just don't use that, and even 99% accuracy isn't good enough: That 1% is killer).
From the /. front page link:
By now, the screenshot on the left side probably has you quite geared up - and you're dying to know why it looks so fancy if Pocket PC 2002 isn't supposed to be all that. Well, the truth is that this screenshot is not taken from Pocket PC 2002, but instead is an XP skin running on top of Snoopsoft's Dashboard application which alters not only the appearance but also the function of the Today screen of the Pocket PC OS. The Dashboard skin is created by web designer Ard-Jan Barnas, and additionally, a free application called wisBar adds functionality to the title bar.
And the reason for why we've mislead you a bit? Well, this is how we - and probably numerous others - would like Pocket PC 2002 to look, with increased functionality compared to the Today screen as it is today. Hopefully, Pocket PC 2002 will have this kind of functionality built-in, but it's hard to say exactly what will be in the new operating system as Microsoft has done its best to keep the lid on it.
Flash back to the Newton. They put all the buttons on the bottom of the screen. The close-box? Bottom right (or left for lefties). Why? Because you can tap the buttons without your hand obscuring the screen. Hey, maybe it was slow, but at least they thought about the interface.
This is something that so few palmtop developers can get right. Another example (just to be ecumenical) is the truly beautiful Palm app DrawIt... the toolbars are inscrutably along the top of the screen, so you can't actually see your drawing while you tap a new tool.
Come on, guys... the palmtop is not the desktop, the stylus is not a mouse (thank heavens!).
Microsoft often abuses popular names and words that have some established meanings in some nearby area to confuse the heck out of users -- bright example of that is "Digital Nervous System" that seems to "share" an acronym with Domain Name System that happens to predate Microsoft's definition by a decade, and, while mentioned a lot, probably isn't clearly to its target audience.
Now where have I seen the word "Merlin" very close to PDAs, but not exactly a PDA-related item last time? Wasn't it a PC version of a popular Minstrel PDA CDPD modem, made by Novatel? Indeed, it is! And, just like with "DNS" and other cases, I don't think that it's a coincidence -- it may not be illegal, but it's hijacking someone else's trademark with the goal to make users think that Microsoft's product is related to something they have heard about.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
the thing is that the whole "START button" is silly
why is it silly ?
because really does the user start multiple process's ? no not really they just start apps up and then refer to another then back again there is not really all that multitasking from the point of veiw of the user
its not like you can open 12 xterms a watch the progress or even watch a video and write a document at the same time
and this is why palmOS is not multitasking at the moment there is little need to (soon people will demand and the power will be there to listen to MP3 and look at the address book/browse web) and the hardware has for a long time been able to do this
the StrongARM that this uses has been out for a long time 3+ years (guesstimate) how long is a processor in the desktop around for ?
linux has been running for a long time on the stongARM the netwinder used it before they tried transmeta and went bankrupt
but the point is that the start button is not a good memonic a start page (like palmOS) with all the apps is a good idea this could be expanded to showing you emails where in the inox (much like a today page) along with news and such
the real thing would proberly look much more like the Microsoft stinger mockup
regards
john jones
A modem that PDA-using people heard of but didn't pay attention.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
this looks to be a better bet get rid of START or even app altogether and just use a voice enabled
for a linux one
http://www.infosync.no/en/news/n/289.asp
and phillips plus a japanese company have done this well
I was at a tradeshow and they had a huge fan and a BMW dash and seat you could talk to the MP3 player and radio even when the fan was on and lots of background noise (the fan simulated being in a car with the roof down apparently)
whatever it was V cool
regards
john jones
{user sees Sarge}
{user says "jump"}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
User eats Sarge's rocket
{User is reincarnated}
{User jumps}
---
But in all seriousness, I've seen very little improvement between the P200 version and the current version that can run on processors 4x faster. Shouldn't there be a MASSIVE improvement by now? What's holding it up?
If God gave us curiosity
The irony in all this is that "Merlin" was the code-name for OS/2 Warp 4, which was the first desktop OS to include speech recognition technology. How can these people be so ignorant of history?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I believe it was Warp version 4, but it was called Merlin. I was a beta tester.
Man, talk about creativity...
Let's see.... is XP their new operating system, or is it Extreme Programming?
...its was given to me by my boss, supposedly to replace my Vx.
It lasted less than a month before I had them return it.
It was slow, it was trying to do FAR more than anything I'm going to drop in my pocket rightly should, the stylus was ludicrous and fell out of the case a couple of times (fortunately I always managed to find it), the WinCE/PocketPC platform is just a mess, and overall it was just nowhere near as elegant as the Palm.
What's ironic is that IBM bundled speech recognition all through OS/2 Warp 4, which just happened to be codenamed Merlin.
It didn't catch on, obviously.
Ever get the feeling that we'll get usable speech recognition when we get jet backpacks and little Jetsons flying cars?
Something that also should be mentioned is that the SD Card slot doesn't support the SD Memory card security function.
This is good news for all of us who oppose copyright-protected media. It is also nothing new, of course. Casio made the same wise decision to employ the SD technology (with its potential advantages over the existing MMC spec) minus copyright-protection. On devices that feature MP3 playback and e-book viewing as key selling points, restricting use of MP3s and e-books would be a hard move to justify.
That is one of the nice things about the iPaq, it has flash memory. Thus you can either flash Merlin into ROM, or Linux.
Oh, speaking of iPaqs and Linux, someone on the handhelds.org hosted list just asked about installing Linux on a 32 meg Flash ROM, 128 meg RAM version 2.0 ROM iPaq. Hmm....
OK, given that ViaVoice currently takes up about 300MB of disk space and needs a minimum system of about 450MHz and 128 RAM, I wonder how accurate the speech for a PDA would be.
Not only do they claim to have just about all the features ViaVoice has, they also claim to be able to run in speaker independent mode - something no other software has been able to do reliably. This will be interesting.