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TI Lands OMAP in a Pocket PC.
An anonymous reader writes: "TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928. TI also landed a SmartPhone reference design agreement with Microsoft, but so did Intel. See the article, and a picture of the unit at Forbes.com."
Doesn't TI know they're supposed to rename any chip for portable/handheld use so that it's an Anime reference?
*cough* Dragonball *cough*
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Does this mean that the Jornada in question isn't a Pocket PC 2002 device any more?
all depends on your way of thinking :)
Umm two standards from Microsoft with one thing in common.....
Microsoft
Well what a suprise, in some ways this must be a massive boon to the people associated with Symbian as it means Microsoft has a fragmented strategy and is pissing off its partners. Could this be the beasts strategy for this market, lots of deals with lots of people so it doesn't progress anywhere ? Wait till Moore's law allows WindowsXP to run on Mobiles, probably 5 years by my calculations.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Don't mess with Texas (Instruments)!
"If you combine a cell phone with a PDA, you're either going to get a PDA that's a crappy cellphone or a cellphone that's a crappy PDA"
As cool as this looks, I don't think the above has been invalidated yet. I'll STILL point to the example that came up with Qualcomm's PDA/Cellphone: What happens when you want to talk to comeone and LOOK AT YOUR PDA at the same time? (Nah, I don't carry the hands free earbud everywhere I go...it's got a CABLE...it gets TANGLED.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Wow. Some competition. Guess we'll soon start seeing Microsoft TI-89 calculators coming out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Well... I guess with TI's calculator background we don't have to worry about any floating point errors...*grin*
This is actually pretty funny. It should at least get a +1.
-Commienst (anon so I do not lose karma for defending this post)
I am into the copy and paste.
Its a better phone (if a little big) because of the PDA functions, and the PDA is superb.
And its actually available in the US as the 9290. Nokia are very smooth also can be used as a terminal emulator to plug into a switch or firewall via the RS232 cable it comes with.
And as for the talking thing.... the Nokia has a full and very good speaker phone, so its open on my desk right now. You can do everything while on a call.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The ones to watch out for are ARM. They have a tendency to sneak their way into practically everything: cars, mobile phones, PSIONs, even your Gameboy Advance.
:)
They have their sticky thumbs in a lot of different pies and because of the practical collapse of PSION handhelds, are probably itching to get back into the palmtop market.
Oh, they're also in your iPod too, and quite possibly your car
is this a terribly written article?
"The intention is to make it easy for manufacturers to create SmartPhones easily."
"The key difference with TI's and Intel's respective plans is that both call for producing phones that run Microsoft's operating system software."
huh?
BAH! Pox on me! Forget to tick the post anonymously box! There goes my karma.
-Commienst (anon so I do not lose karma for offtopicness)
Where does linux fit in to all this? I know of a few projets to port linux to the ARM platform, but what about the IT one? What *nix based/IT based handhelds are out there, or are being worked on?
Not!! Sorry, but is it just me who would like arcane acronyms defined once and a while. This one wasn't even on everything2.com
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Perhaps the fabrication of these PDA chips will be a good toehold for the next Intel of the chip industry, since it's too hard to break into the current desktop market with the complexity of those chips.
Was that out loud?
Other OMAP-related products:
e lId=sc02025.
:: A Weblog On Crack (updated daily)
MICROSOFT AND TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INTRODUCE WINDOWS-POWERED SMARTPHONE 2002 AND OMAP(TM) REFERENCE DESIGN
New 2.5G Reference Design Combines Strengths of Smartphone 2002 Software and TI's OMAP Processors to Enable Rich Voice and Data-Capable Phones in Small, Sleek Form Factor
You can read the full article at http://focus.ti.com/docs/pr/pressrelease.jhtml?pr
I also suspect that many other products will begin to appear similar to this new Jornada and SmartPhone. You can probably sign-up to be notified on ti.com (Texas Instruments' website).
EricKrout.com
For those who are not so lucky to get there quick enough, go here to see pics and screenshots.
If I have to choose between HP and Treo, I would prefer Treo. It's smaller and I want a phone that can be PDA. This HP is PDA that has phone feature. but for someone who paln to do a lot of wireless web browser, HP beats treo to the ground.
"Supports leading mobile operating systems such as Windows CE, Symbian OS, Palm OS and Linux."
also
"Use high-level programming languages such as C/C++, Java etc."
Mmmmm, another nice mobile Java platform. =)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Mod him up!
Somehow I could never imagine this completely bizarre development happening at Intel, although I could be wrong. Anyway, TI is, by many reports, a pretty messed up place.
infoSync's article has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Still... I want one!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
They already do... it's called Embedded XP
Where does linux fit in to all this?
:-)
Let the karma whoring commence!
They already have Linux running on these, on both the ARM and the C55x DSP cores that comprise the OMAP chip. They even share the same process space, so you can initiate/control/kill processes on the DSP from the ARM. This is being done by a third party company called RidgeRun Unfortunately, the OMAP version is not quite out yet it seems, but they have versions out for ARM + C54x DSP.
Read this PDF for more technical info.
Compilers are gcc in the case of the ARM, and the TI proprietary compiler for the DSP (ported to Linux). Debugger in both cases is GDB.
Mechanik
Disclaimer: I am a TI employee.
Yes, I do work for TI.
>> TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928.
I would hardly call the cell phone and handheld market "Intel's territory." The cell phone market already dominated by TI (60%+ market share), while Motorola has a much stronger presence in the handheld market with its Dragonball processor. In fact, TI has signed up 9 out the top 10 cell phone manufacturers to use its OMAP platform.
Go ARM!
Too bad nobody seems to be taking any open source based options for cell phones...
So that means its got a life expectancy of around 12 months everywhere else but the US. Add in time to manufacture and get running and this really is a bizarre agreement. Its like signing an agreement for 56k modems as everyone else moves to DSL.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
When an engineer uses "efficiency", it means getting the most output for the least input -- a good thing because it tends to conserve finite natural resources. [1] But when an economist uses "efficiency", it means "efficient distribution" -- a bad thing because it tends to deplete natural resources (all economic activity wastes finite energy stocks). Economic efficiency means the "correct people" (those who can afford it) get the "correct goods and services" (whatever they want; technically known as "Pareto Optimality", which incidentally, doesn't exist). Economic efficiency rewards people who are the most successful at converting natural resources into industrial garbage ... so they can invest in even more conversion of natural resources into industrial garbage.
If one can think like an engineer (social scientists will have difficulty doing this), one can deduce from first principles, history, and observation that a society based on "economic efficiency" will crash and dieoff. Here's how:
1). Visit the astronomy department at your local university and verify that Earth is indeed spherical. All spheres are finite, thus Earth is finite. Therefore, you can deduce that Earth's energy resources are finite too -- finite "energy stocks" (e.g., oil) and finite "energy flows" (e.g., wind).
2). Visit the physics department and verify that: Energy is the capacity to do work (no energy = no work). Thus, the global economy is 100 percent dependent on energy -- it always has been, and it always will be. There are NO exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics.
The First Law of thermodynamics tells us that neither capital nor labor nor technology can "create" energy. Instead, available energy must be spent to transform existing energy stocks, or to divert an existing energy flow into more available energy.
The Second Law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is wasted at every step in the economic process. The engines that actually do the work in our economy (so-called "heat engines", such as diesel engines) waste more than 50 percent of the energy contained in their fuel.
Energy resources must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called "sinks" (this is known as the "net energy" principle). About 735 joules of energy are required to lift 15 kg of oil 5 meters out of the ground just to overcome gravity -- and the higher the lift, the greater the energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible oil is produced first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to find and produce oil. At some point, more energy is spent finding and producing oil than the energy recovered -- and the "resource" has become a "sink".
3). Visit the ecology (or population biology) department and verify that "overshoot", "crash", and "dieoff" are common in nature. Dieoff occurs when animals run out of energy stocks (food). H. sapiens are running out of energy stocks (fossil fuel first, and then food).
Now that you have deduced the dieoff scenario from the science, turn on your TV set and observe that "dieoff" is already underway in Russia and Africa.
The only remaining question is when will "dieoff" come to a location near you? Many industry experts expect it in less than ten years. Some say it is here already.
"Do something man. Right now."