The split-screen works great! The grafiti area is down in the lower half of the clamshell, so that when you hold it in your hand, the writing pressure is against your palm, while the display is angled where you can see it.
It also works great on a desktop, since the LCD looks best facing it straight on.
By splitting the two, you end up with a smaller piece of glass, so it's less fragile.
You can have one of these when your handheld draws MICRO-amps, and you carry it around all the time.
It will be about the same time as when your handheld can run for a year off an lithium battery the size of a dime. Show me the backlight on one of those "self-powered" watches. Oh? They can't even power a backlight? It will be a while...
There are some good reasons why devices still use alkaline batteries instead of rechargable:
- It's cheaper. Making the user buy AAA cells is cheaper than an expensive built-in rechargable. Be angry if you want, but the same shoppers that gripe are the ones that will pick the AAA model because it's $10 cheaper.:)
- Charger required. more $$$, bigger packaging, more travelling weight, country-specific voltage, UL Listing, the works.
- Alkalines last longer (per charge) than rechargables. On a device may go weeks without seeing a charger, this counts.
- Rechargable cells die. What do you do with a PalmV that no longer charges well? LiIon cells only last a year or two before they start to degrade quickly.
I'm not saying that these are valid reasons to require disposable batteries, but these are factors that manufacturers look at in deciding which way to go.
I am SO SICK of hearing about this damn holographic storage. It has been polluting print media with wild-eyed hype since the days before Internet. I remember reading about this very thing back when Winchester was shipping 32MB 5.25" hard disks. "Two to five years away" my ass.
Call me when it's in stock. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever can ship on Holographic crystals.
The weird thing about the Aiptek 1.3 is its use of DRAM to hold the video data. Cool because it's cheap and small, but bad because of the constant thirst for power, even when off.
So the AAA batteries last one week whether you use the camera or not. Something to think about if you're thinking of carrying one around in your pocket.
Uh, the fact that "The shot capacity is unaffected by your choice" should be a HUGE red flag.
How do you think it stores FOUR TIMES as many pixels in the same amount of memory? Think about it.
The fact is, it's a 640x480 sensor that stores 640x480 pictures. At the time you upload them to your computer, the software will do a crummy job of expanding the image to fill 1280x960, just like you could do yourself in any image editor.
Why stop there? They could advertise 1600x1200 resolution, or even "Six Megapixels!". Once you're interpolating in software, the sky is the limit. You could make gigabyte-images if you like. They will look like total crap, but the marketing department can never tell the difference.
When people ask how many megapixels or "what resolution", they're asking about the sensor in the camera, since that's where your quality starts.
Logitech is flat out lying, and should be called on the FRAUD and deceptive advertising. I hope a more ethical reviewer will take such a stance and punish them for abusing recognized terms with incorrect specs.
There's a micro-USB port on the back of my Sony XM01 receiver, 'hidden' under a silver sticker, but plainly marked with the USB logo.
Has anyone tried connecting it? What might it be for.. The radio has a "Memorize" feature that notes the information on whatever is playing when you hit the button. Maybe some way to download that information.
Or maybe it's just for firmware upgrading.
If I had a micro-USB cable, I'd at least try plugging it in.
Each radio has a unique serial number (Receiver ID, whatever). When you buy the radio, you go to their web page or call their center and subscribe. This is how you set up billing and such, usually paid quarterly on a credit card.
Then they send an "activation" signal to your receiver over the same satellite signal. It's sent every 10 minutes for the first 60 hours after you subscribe. If you don't pay your bills, they deactivate your receiver. Without the activation, you can only listen to the Preview Channel (Channel 1) which gives you ads and information on how to sign up.
I went with XM Radio, and a Sony XM01 receiver. Most audio comparisons between the two favor XM's sound quality over Sirius. I haven't listened to Sirius, so I can't comment on the channel lineup, but they seemed pretty similar in terms of no-commercial channels and breadth.
Choose your receiver carefully. Don't let them sell you an "FM Modulator" -- hardwire your receiver to get all that sound quality you pay for. After all, an FM Modulator can only sound as good as FM.
The Sony receiver is nice, and I like that it is removable. However, it has some drawbacks. The blue-backlit screen is terribly blurry and hard to read, especially at a quick you-should-be-driving glance. It only has five presets, which is fewer than I would like on a lineup of 100 channels.
The XM programming so far has been terrific. No complaints there. Ethel rocks.
For all those hosers and thread-crappers saying "Get an MP3 player", "Get a CD Changer", you miss the point! I'm tired of listening to the same CDs I've heard before. Where do you go to hear something new? Your own CD collection? Your own MP3s? I go to the radio, and XM Radio beats FM.
I've been running a Koolance PC2-601 case for a month now and love it. It's an Antec SX1030 with a fully-integrated watercool system. No milk jugs and aquarium pumps here, and a full-size radiator that can handle anything, and a CLOSED water system.
I'm oc'ing an Athlon 1800 XP to 2100 and it's holding 36c at the lowest fan speed. It's also cooling the MB chip, Nvidia chip, and two hard drives. Amazing. The Koolance is so madly overbuilt it's hilarious. Two pumps for backup, a sweet control panel, and no ungainly hoses sticking out of the case.
Best of all, the system itself is almost silent! I can't hear the pumps at all, and the top fans spin so slow as to be a whisper. The power supply fan drowns out the whole thing.
Tired of messing with crazy hoses and, uh, cotton string? Pony up the whopping $275. Given that a regular SX1030 is almost half that, it's a hell of a deal. The smaller version is even cheaper. I'm sick of hearing that pro watercooling is expensive or difficult. I finally have a fast machine that doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner, and it's not like I broke the bank.
Not a StrongARM, it's ARM7. No MMU, so uClinux.
on
GameBoy Web Server
·
· Score: 1
It's not a StrongARM, it's an ARM7TDMI running at 16.78MHz. 256K RAM 240x160 LCD.
So it has more horsepower than a Palm, but still no memory manager or cache. This means it's restricted to MMU-free micro-ports of Linux like uClinux.
Like someone else posted.. not impossible, but probably not terribly satisfying as a target. Not to say it wouldn't be a satisfying, educational, or fun project, though.:)
This is one of those things that just can't be explained to people who don't see the value in it. If you don't need a remote MP3 player, then you just don't need one and you can run long wires or FM transmitters, or whatever gives you "reasonable quality".
But for me, the advantage to a real MP3 player is huge. The PC doesn't play the audio! It could be playing something completely different, or playing a game, while the audio plays elsewhere (in the livingroom). Or I could have different audio in each room with a Rio and no extra wire pairs.
How far do you think you can run that unshielded wire before it picks up hum from nearby AC lines?
In a pinch, I've run video over twisted pair too, but that doesn't mean I liked it.:)
I suppose that's fine if you like the quality and dynamic range of FM Radio. Blech! It's bad enough going from true CD Quality to MP3, but to snuff it further to FM bandwidth, that's sacrilege.
Besides, if you buy any of the lower-end FM transmitter kits, they use lousy tuning circuits that need to be constantly adjusted to stay on frequency. And they're woefully underpowered. Just walking around the room will detune them or cut your signal. Give me real copper wire anyway.
The Rio Receiver plays OGG files just fine, if you use JReceiver. JReceiver has some "transcoders" to handle non-native audio formats like OGG, so it converts your OGG files to MP3 on the fly while streaming them to the Rio Reciever.
If you don't like that, you can always hack the Rio Receiver software yourself to add an OGG player. The whole mounted filesystem is there for you to play with. You can replace the whole player with Ogg Vorbis if you like.
My Rio Receiver works great, and I've never run the Windows software. The Rio Receiver is one of the best values around for remote networked MP3 players. At its core, the Rio Receiver (aka Sonic Blue) is an ARM7 processor running Linux.
With a little work, you can get it to boot from a Linux server and mount its filesystem over NFS. (This is what the Windows software does, more or less.) The entire filesystem is in the "receiver.arf" tar file that comes with the software.
The most well-known Rio server hack for Linux was put together by Jeff Mock and available from his webpage. If you're reasonably familiar with setting up remote-booting machines, the Rio should not be much of a challenge. Jeff wrote a small perl daemon to handle the unique boot sequence for the Rio, and a larger set of scripts to serve up the MP3 files.
After using Jeff's fine server for a while, I found I wanted something with better MP3 management and playlist support. That's when I found the JReceiver Project. This software rocks! It's a royal PITA to set up if you're not a Java programmer, but it does quite a bit. It's a full SQL front-end for your MP3 content, so playlists can be dynamic from SQL expressions ("I want all new ROCK songs added in the last 14 DAYS that are not by CREED"). And of course, it serves the Rio directly. It will also handle the booting if you want to boot Rio from the same Linux machine that runs JReceiver.
Last, Frank van Gestel put together a terrific modification to the Rio Receiver filesystem that adds a local http server to the receiver box itself. This serves up the exact front-panel display to a web browser, and you can operate all the controls remotely over the network. Now you can get a clear view of the Receiver screen without being right in front of it. Further, it will let you control the line-level volume output as well as the speaker output (a shortcoming of the original kernel). You can get the patch files in this thread
All in all, this is the best networked MP3 player going for under $100. Audiotron is nice, but this is cheaper and far more hackable. Runs Linux, boots from Linux, built-in ethernet, and has no fan or hard drive.
The only disappointment is that it has no digital audio (SPDIF) output. No coax, no optical.. line level only. Ah well, MP3's aren't exactly hifi anyway.
DOC is DiskOnChip, from M-Systems. It's a flash memory chip that can replace the BIOS chip and provide some amount of nonvolatile storage.
Their magic is in their BIOS "enhancement" code that makes the flash memory appear as a bootable disk drive. In DOS, it shows up as C:, and they have boot code for several operating systems, including Linux. Linux drivers for mounting/writing the filesystem are also available.
Second, you don't need a PCMCIA slot to use CompactFlash as a boot device. CompactFlash is already IDE-compliant and can be directly plugged into the IDE controller with the right adapter. They run about $20 from places like this.
The CompactFlash solution would give you a removable boot device that could be easily mounted/read on any other system. The DOC is smaller, but more convenient since it's already integrated.
If you're expecting to power a small hard drive off AA batteries, you can't expect wonders for battery life. The NexII player itself doesn't use much.
I've had no problems getting 13+ hours from CompactFlash at moderate volume.
If you want extreme battery life, try the Energizer AA Lithium cells. They cost around $2 each, but they last incredibly long. They're ultra-light and work at low temperatures as well, making them a perfect match for snowboarding.
I'm surprised the reviewer didn't complain about my favorite NexII bug: It can't descend into subdirectories!
If you store your music files on the CF card like this:
/Artist/Album/01-Song.mp3
The NexII (with v1.4c firmware) CAN'T SEE any of your music. It will only search one directory level deep. So "/Album/01-Song.mp3" works fine.
It's not a big problem when you know about it, but it sucks when you forget to shuffle the files and find out only when you go to listen to them.
I've emailed Frontier Labs about this, and they are aware of the problem. I have hope that a future firmware release could do better. If it bothers you too, consider emailing them today.
I bought the same NexII MP3 player a couple months ago from mydigitaldiscount.com. They sell the player with various sizes of RiData 20x CF memory cards. Player+256MB was $199, with Free Shipping.
I had one of these and dorked around with it a little.
From what I can tell, it was probably designed by MOTO based on their Cypress CY7C63413-PC reference design. You can find detailed information (and schematics) in the MO1001 PDF Document at their web page.
Used for its intended purpose, it's a total joke and destined for the Clearance bin. It's an aweful mousepad, and the card doesn't add anything over what any user already has.
As a USB ISO-7816 card reader with some buttons, it's more interesting, but I wasn't able to figure out how to talk to the card directly. In theory, it should be able to communicate with GSM SIM cards (with an adapter), Satellite TV cards, some student id cards, etc.
The Thumb instructions are encoded into 16 bits instead of the ARM's 32. This achieves higher code compression, but costs a few instructions.
Among those instructions you can't use in Thumb mode are the ones to control the processor configuration.. system registers. You have to be in ARM mode to do things like mask interrupts, so I'd imagine a kernel would have to have at least some ARM-mode code in it. However, at least on the ARM7, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth. (It cues off the low bit of the instruction address, so switching "modes" is little more than branching to a new odd/even address.)
Slashdot Mirror
The split-screen works great! The grafiti area is down in the lower half of the clamshell, so that when you hold it in your hand, the writing pressure is against your palm, while the display is angled where you can see it.
It also works great on a desktop, since the LCD looks best facing it straight on.
By splitting the two, you end up with a smaller piece of glass, so it's less fragile.
Clever idea.
You can have one of these when your handheld draws MICRO-amps, and you carry it around all the time.
It will be about the same time as when your handheld can run for a year off an lithium battery the size of a dime.
Show me the backlight on one of those "self-powered" watches. Oh? They can't even power a backlight? It will be a while...
There are some good reasons why devices still use alkaline batteries instead of rechargable:
:)
- It's cheaper. Making the user buy AAA cells is cheaper than an expensive built-in rechargable. Be angry if you want, but the same shoppers that gripe are the ones that will pick the AAA model because it's $10 cheaper.
- Charger required. more $$$, bigger packaging, more travelling weight, country-specific voltage, UL Listing, the works.
- Alkalines last longer (per charge) than rechargables. On a device may go weeks without seeing a charger, this counts.
- Rechargable cells die. What do you do with a PalmV that no longer charges well? LiIon cells only last a year or two before they start to degrade quickly.
I'm not saying that these are valid reasons to require disposable batteries, but these are factors that manufacturers look at in deciding which way to go.
I am SO SICK of hearing about this damn holographic storage. It has been polluting print media with wild-eyed hype since the days before Internet. I remember reading about this very thing back when Winchester was shipping 32MB 5.25" hard disks.
"Two to five years away" my ass.
Call me when it's in stock. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever can ship on Holographic crystals.
The only known Tages-protected game is "Moto Racer 3". Does anyone have one to compare the artwork to Disk 3?
Ahh, found it:
http://motion.technolust.cx/
Do you have a link to "Motion"? I'm looking to set up something like this.
As you can imagine, a search for "motion security camera open source" didn't turn up the right things.
The weird thing about the Aiptek 1.3 is its use of DRAM to hold the video data. Cool because it's cheap and small, but bad because of the constant thirst for power, even when off.
So the AAA batteries last one week whether you use the camera or not. Something to think about if you're thinking of carrying one around in your pocket.
Uh, the fact that "The shot capacity is unaffected by your choice" should be a HUGE red flag.
How do you think it stores FOUR TIMES as many pixels in the same amount of memory? Think about it.
The fact is, it's a 640x480 sensor that stores 640x480 pictures. At the time you upload them to your computer, the software will do a crummy job of expanding the image to fill 1280x960, just like you could do yourself in any image editor.
Why stop there? They could advertise 1600x1200 resolution, or even "Six Megapixels!". Once you're interpolating in software, the sky is the limit. You could make gigabyte-images if you like. They will look like total crap, but the marketing department can never tell the difference.
When people ask how many megapixels or "what resolution", they're asking about the sensor in the camera, since that's where your quality starts.
Logitech is flat out lying, and should be called on the FRAUD and deceptive advertising. I hope a more ethical reviewer will take such a stance and punish them for abusing recognized terms with incorrect specs.
There's a micro-USB port on the back of my Sony XM01 receiver, 'hidden' under a silver sticker, but plainly marked with the USB logo.
Has anyone tried connecting it? What might it be for.. The radio has a "Memorize" feature that notes the information on whatever is playing when you hit the button. Maybe some way to download that information.
Or maybe it's just for firmware upgrading.
If I had a micro-USB cable, I'd at least try plugging it in.
Each radio has a unique serial number (Receiver ID, whatever). When you buy the radio, you go to their web page or call their center and subscribe. This is how you set up billing and such, usually paid quarterly on a credit card.
Then they send an "activation" signal to your receiver over the same satellite signal. It's sent every 10 minutes for the first 60 hours after you subscribe. If you don't pay your bills, they deactivate your receiver.
Without the activation, you can only listen to the Preview Channel (Channel 1) which gives you ads and information on how to sign up.
So yeah, it's a lot like satellite TV that way.
I went with XM Radio, and a Sony XM01 receiver. Most audio comparisons between the two favor XM's sound quality over Sirius. I haven't listened to Sirius, so I can't comment on the channel lineup, but they seemed pretty similar in terms of no-commercial channels and breadth.
Choose your receiver carefully. Don't let them sell you an "FM Modulator" -- hardwire your receiver to get all that sound quality you pay for. After all, an FM Modulator can only sound as good as FM.
The Sony receiver is nice, and I like that it is removable. However, it has some drawbacks. The blue-backlit screen is terribly blurry and hard to read, especially at a quick you-should-be-driving glance. It only has five presets, which is fewer than I would like on a lineup of 100 channels.
The XM programming so far has been terrific. No complaints there. Ethel rocks.
For all those hosers and thread-crappers saying "Get an MP3 player", "Get a CD Changer", you miss the point! I'm tired of listening to the same CDs I've heard before. Where do you go to hear something new? Your own CD collection? Your own MP3s? I go to the radio, and XM Radio beats FM.
I've been running a Koolance PC2-601 case for a month now and love it. It's an Antec SX1030 with a fully-integrated watercool system. No milk jugs and aquarium pumps here, and a full-size radiator that can handle anything, and a CLOSED water system.
I'm oc'ing an Athlon 1800 XP to 2100 and it's holding 36c at the lowest fan speed. It's also cooling the MB chip, Nvidia chip, and two hard drives. Amazing. The Koolance is so madly overbuilt it's hilarious. Two pumps for backup, a sweet control panel, and no ungainly hoses sticking out of the case.
Best of all, the system itself is almost silent! I can't hear the pumps at all, and the top fans spin so slow as to be a whisper. The power supply fan drowns out the whole thing.
Tired of messing with crazy hoses and, uh, cotton string? Pony up the whopping $275. Given that a regular SX1030 is almost half that, it's a hell of a deal. The smaller version is even cheaper. I'm sick of hearing that pro watercooling is expensive or difficult. I finally have a fast machine that doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner, and it's not like I broke the bank.
It's not a StrongARM, it's an ARM7TDMI running at 16.78MHz. 256K RAM 240x160 LCD.
:)
So it has more horsepower than a Palm, but still no memory manager or cache. This means it's restricted to MMU-free micro-ports of Linux like uClinux.
Like someone else posted.. not impossible, but probably not terribly satisfying as a target. Not to say it wouldn't be a satisfying, educational, or fun project, though.
That's a bummer. I got mine from Tiger Direct for $99 in January. Keep watching, maybe they'll come back. $99 is the right price for these.
This is one of those things that just can't be explained to people who don't see the value in it. If you don't need a remote MP3 player, then you just don't need one and you can run long wires or FM transmitters, or whatever gives you "reasonable quality".
:)
But for me, the advantage to a real MP3 player is huge. The PC doesn't play the audio! It could be playing something completely different, or playing a game, while the audio plays elsewhere (in the livingroom). Or I could have different audio in each room with a Rio and no extra wire pairs.
How far do you think you can run that unshielded wire before it picks up hum from nearby AC lines?
In a pinch, I've run video over twisted pair too, but that doesn't mean I liked it.
I suppose that's fine if you like the quality and dynamic range of FM Radio. Blech! It's bad enough going from true CD Quality to MP3, but to snuff it further to FM bandwidth, that's sacrilege.
Besides, if you buy any of the lower-end FM transmitter kits, they use lousy tuning circuits that need to be constantly adjusted to stay on frequency. And they're woefully underpowered. Just walking around the room will detune them or cut your signal. Give me real copper wire anyway.
The Rio Receiver plays OGG files just fine, if you use JReceiver. JReceiver has some "transcoders" to handle non-native audio formats like OGG, so it converts your OGG files to MP3 on the fly while streaming them to the Rio Reciever.
If you don't like that, you can always hack the Rio Receiver software yourself to add an OGG player. The whole mounted filesystem is there for you to play with. You can replace the whole player with Ogg Vorbis if you like.
My Rio Receiver works great, and I've never run the Windows software. The Rio Receiver is one of the best values around for remote networked MP3 players. At its core, the Rio Receiver (aka Sonic Blue) is an ARM7 processor running Linux.
With a little work, you can get it to boot from a Linux server and mount its filesystem over NFS. (This is what the Windows software does, more or less.) The entire filesystem is in the "receiver.arf" tar file that comes with the software.
The most well-known Rio server hack for Linux was put together by Jeff Mock and available from his webpage. If you're reasonably familiar with setting up remote-booting machines, the Rio should not be much of a challenge. Jeff wrote a small perl daemon to handle the unique boot sequence for the Rio, and a larger set of scripts to serve up the MP3 files.
After using Jeff's fine server for a while, I found I wanted something with better MP3 management and playlist support. That's when I found the JReceiver Project. This software rocks! It's a royal PITA to set up if you're not a Java programmer, but it does quite a bit. It's a full SQL front-end for your MP3 content, so playlists can be dynamic from SQL expressions ("I want all new ROCK songs added in the last 14 DAYS that are not by CREED"). And of course, it serves the Rio directly. It will also handle the booting if you want to boot Rio from the same Linux machine that runs JReceiver.
Last, Frank van Gestel put together a terrific modification to the Rio Receiver filesystem that adds a local http server to the receiver box itself. This serves up the exact front-panel display to a web browser, and you can operate all the controls remotely over the network. Now you can get a clear view of the Receiver screen without being right in front of it. Further, it will let you control the line-level volume output as well as the speaker output (a shortcoming of the original kernel). You can get the patch files in this thread
Lots of intelligent discussion on the Rio boxes at rioreceiver.comms.net
All in all, this is the best networked MP3 player going for under $100. Audiotron is nice, but this is cheaper and far more hackable. Runs Linux, boots from Linux, built-in ethernet, and has no fan or hard drive.
The only disappointment is that it has no digital audio (SPDIF) output. No coax, no optical.. line level only. Ah well, MP3's aren't exactly hifi anyway.
Enjoy!
DOC is DiskOnChip, from M-Systems. It's a flash memory chip that can replace the BIOS chip and provide some amount of nonvolatile storage.
Their magic is in their BIOS "enhancement" code that makes the flash memory appear as a bootable disk drive. In DOS, it shows up as C:, and they have boot code for several operating systems, including Linux. Linux drivers for mounting/writing the filesystem are also available.
Second, you don't need a PCMCIA slot to use CompactFlash as a boot device. CompactFlash is already IDE-compliant and can be directly plugged into the IDE controller with the right adapter. They run about $20 from places like this.
The CompactFlash solution would give you a removable boot device that could be easily mounted/read on any other system. The DOC is smaller, but more convenient since it's already integrated.
If you're expecting to power a small hard drive off AA batteries, you can't expect wonders for battery life. The NexII player itself doesn't use much.
I've had no problems getting 13+ hours from CompactFlash at moderate volume.
If you want extreme battery life, try the Energizer AA Lithium cells. They cost around $2 each, but they last incredibly long. They're ultra-light and work at low temperatures as well, making them a perfect match for snowboarding.
I'm surprised the reviewer didn't complain about my favorite NexII bug: It can't descend into subdirectories!
/Artist/Album/01-Song.mp3
If you store your music files on the CF card like this:
The NexII (with v1.4c firmware) CAN'T SEE any of your music. It will only search one directory level deep. So "/Album/01-Song.mp3" works fine.
It's not a big problem when you know about it, but it sucks when you forget to shuffle the files and find out only when you go to listen to them.
I've emailed Frontier Labs about this, and they are aware of the problem. I have hope that a future firmware release could do better. If it bothers you too, consider emailing them today.
I bought the same NexII MP3 player a couple months ago from mydigitaldiscount.com. They sell the player with various sizes of RiData 20x CF memory cards. Player+256MB was $199, with Free Shipping.
www.mydigitaldiscount.com Nex II prices.
I mostly got the package for the RiData CF card, since it's seriously fast and works great in the digital camera.
I had one of these and dorked around with it a little.
:CueCats and want a new toy?
From what I can tell, it was probably designed by MOTO based on their Cypress CY7C63413-PC reference design. You can find detailed information (and schematics) in the MO1001 PDF Document at their web page.
Used for its intended purpose, it's a total joke and destined for the Clearance bin. It's an aweful mousepad, and the card doesn't add anything over what any user already has.
As a USB ISO-7816 card reader with some buttons, it's more interesting, but I wasn't able to figure out how to talk to the card directly. In theory, it should be able to communicate with GSM SIM cards (with an adapter), Satellite TV cards, some student id cards, etc.
Maybe the Flying Butt Monkeys are tired of
The Thumb instructions are encoded into 16 bits instead of the ARM's 32. This achieves higher code compression, but costs a few instructions. Among those instructions you can't use in Thumb mode are the ones to control the processor configuration.. system registers. You have to be in ARM mode to do things like mask interrupts, so I'd imagine a kernel would have to have at least some ARM-mode code in it. However, at least on the ARM7, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth. (It cues off the low bit of the instruction address, so switching "modes" is little more than branching to a new odd/even address.)