All this talk about interference between WLAN and Bluetooth is more or less rubbish in my experience. Both at work and at home, I work every day with both Bluetooth and WLAN at the same time and I've never had any problems or slowdowns of either one. On my laptop, I have both and both are enabled at all times - no problems, ever. At work, just two rooms over from mine, people code Bluetooth code every day with several Bluetooth devices, some of which are experimental. The same office space has a WLAN network and nobody ever complains about interference.. *shrug*
"Copy-pasted" and then obviously modified it so that it would compile in C - such as not making a class out of the whole app, not passing a String[] to main(), not having main be "static" etc.:) Nothing essential such as the actual algorithm and math code was touched, however.
A non-programmer friend asked me a while back how you can "figure out" prime numbers with a computer program. So.. In order to show him the basic idea, I "pair programmed" a simple example that just started counting from 1 and up and then for each number, looped from 2 and up to half the original number to do a modulo on them. I implemented it in Java first.. The next day, a guy at work asked me why I had done it in Java.. So.. I copy-pasted the 20-or-so line code to C and compiled it. Standard compiler flags for both Java and C.. And I ran it.. and timed searching the first 100000 prime numbers. Java was about 10% faster and I wasn't even surprised.. Why? Cause this is exactly the kind of situation where Java can be faster than C. It's very easy to do a similar test yourself. Doesn't even have to be prime numbers. Just do whatever kind of random math you want and see for yourself. With the HotSpot virtual machine, things like this get optimized like crazy by the virtual machine. If you would compile it with all speed optimization flags, inlining methods etc.. I don't know - I'm guessing C would be a bit faster, but it would still be very close.. But don't take my word for it - try for yourself.
So compact flash sucks too because it's more expensive than CD's and incompatible? Dataplay discs are VERY small. That's the whole point. They are intended for digital cameras, PDA's and similar small, battery driven devices. Not PC's. Not even laptops.
Instead of focusing on being funny when submitting the article, how about focusing on being clued in?
I'm not saying that the Win NT / 2K / XP command line is as powerful as a UNIX one, of course, but:
1) Windows has tab completion. It's just not turned on by default. (Do help cmd from the shell in Win 2K (at least) to get a description of it. You can also configure the completion char to something other than tab..)
2) cat exists, it's called type
3) grep exists, it's called find. If find isn't sufficiently powerful for you, you can always get grep for Windows.
4) piping and redirection works more or less exactly like in UNIX with the same syntax even
Of course all of this stuff isn't as commonly used on Windows as it is in UNIX, but it doesn't mean that it's not there.
http://europe.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/07/23/micr so ft.office.idg/
500,000 copies of Office 2001 for Macintosh for a price of around $400 each (depends on where you buy it) means they have brought in $200 million USD on just Office 2001 in about a year or so. MS Office 98 has sold 3.5 million copies so MS has brought in almost 1.5 *billion* USD on that product.
It's a cash cow for them.. Of course they are not discontinuing it!
I find it amusing how everyone thinks that everything Microsoft does is to capture and control the industry or to do whatever acts of evil. Did it occur to you that they are supporting Macintosh because they are selling huges amounts of software that way and thus making lots of money?
Well like some people have pointed out, similar systems exist. One of the main reasons that I'm doing this is as a mental exercise. Simply to DO IT. The fact that similar systems exist is just a "proof of concept" for me really.. It proves that the idea isn't totally crazy.:)
With custom tags and flags for emails, you can set it up so that it's exactly like a traditional folder based email system. So the way I see it, it can only improve on existing email systems, as long as it performs well.. But that's part of the challenge => the fun.:)
I've been planning an email system that is based on searches rather than folders. The user interface might be "folders" but in reality, each "folder" is actually a search into an email database. This means a number of things. First of all, emails can exist in any number of folders (including no folder at all). Folders can have all kinds of "complex" rules such as "unread emails plus emails that have been read within the last 10 minutes". This would be a kind of "inbox", for example. Then there could be "Today's emails". "Yesterday's emails", "Emails from Firstname Lastname", "Work related email" and so on. Emails can be flagged using filters to help categorizing them. For example you could have a folder "work emails" that simply search for all emails that have a "work" flag set. The work flag would be set when the email arrives by checking if the email matches a set of rules (is from certain people, is to a certain email address, has a certain topic etc.).
The basic idea is to get powerful email management without having to actually manage "at runtime". Instead, the management happens by setting up folders and rules.
One implementation idea is to implement it as an IMAP server that one would run locally. That would allow people to use existing email clients with this system. I haven't decided about that yet though.
"I understand (and appreciate) the use of HTML for windows help; however there isn't anything you can't do in the help by using [JA]Script and CSS, and aside from ActiveX, that isn't anything that any other browser couldn't provide"
Yes, there is. Being able to embed the browser component into applications, just like it's any another widget. You can do that with Mozilla now, but not with Netscape 4.x.
"and GSM [gsmworld.com] which run in North America at 1900 MHz as opposed to 800 MHz most everywhere else."
Partly correct. GSM in North America is indeed at 1900 MHz but elsewhere in the world it's 900 MHz and 1800 MHz. Your average "dual band" GSM phones work on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz, except for Nokia's 8890 which works at 900 and 1900 MHz. Tribands work on all three. I think there's another band used for GSM too in North America - 800 MHz (possibly 850 MHz) but I'm not 100% sure about that one.
A lot of people have answered in various ways but missed the main point I was making. The main point was: why should it be different than what it is for normal physical mail?
Someone mentioned an example where I send a nude photo from Finland to USA (legal in both Finland and USA). Then I went to Africa and got arrested cause in the country I went to, it was illegal. Why is that different in any way from if I had sent a nude PHYSICAL photo rather than a FILE? The physical photo travels from one country to another by car, train, plane or other means. The digital photo travels on the internet from server to server, router to router from one country to another, passing a number of countries on the way.
It is no different. Why should the Internet be considered some kind of other dimension that is not in "any country"? That does not reflect reality at all. In reality, the servers, routers etc. are in fact IN countries. There is nothing different from the Internet to normal mail, except for the speed of which data moves.
Kiddy porn isn't illegal on "The Internet" so it's fine to do it there. Right? Of course not!
Why do people think that the Internet is somehow a different place, outside of all nations. It's not. It's made up by servers and cables that are on the territories of real nations. It's used by people and companies who live in real nations. These people and companies are bound by normal laws. If I send kiddy porn from Finland to the USA over the Internet, why should it be any different than if I send it with normal mail and the pictures are physical?
Same thing in this case! The defence is completely brain dead!
I was in Japan a few months ago when FOMA was launched.. I played with both the iMode phones and the FOMA phone. Sure, they are nice, but really, technology wise, iMode & iAppli has nothing to offer that WAP and J2ME wouldn't already accomplish. Or let's say COULD. What you said about content quality is the key issue. Japanese content is good. In Europe, it's complete crap. It's not the fault of the technology tho, so I don't see how going iMode would change it.
"While this is great I suppose, I am surprised that they will not begin with the usual heavy-weight mobile-phone-friendly countries, such as Finland, Sweden.."
I live in Finland and I'm definitely a "first mover". Guess what? I wouldn't get an i-mode phone. I'm perfectly happy with my current GSM triple band, GPRS & Bluetooth capable Ericsson T68 (it has a color screen too and is very small). It works in just about every country in the world, USA included. My laptop and PDA connects to the internet with it, without any wires what so ever. GPRS is pretty cheap too (depending of course what you use it for). What extra would i-mode give me over the current phone and service that I have?
GSM & GPRS & SMS & WAP & J2ME are technology wise up there with i-mode. GSM gives you something that i-mode doesn't: it works just about anywhere in the world.
Sure there is. Of course browsing habits and preferences vary but if you took CNN, BBC, Time magazine or a similar site and looked at their stats, you'd see something which is much closer to the actual average of all users than the ones you are seeing on your site, for example. I mean, you don't REALLY think that 27% of all WWW users surf with Netscape and that out of those, 52.3% would be using Mozilla. Personally I'd be surprised if 1% of WWW users have even HEARD of Mozilla!
This is not to say that Mozilla would not be a good brower - or going to be a good browser. That's a separate issue. I'm just saying that if you measure stats on "neutral" sites (or maybe average from 50 large neutralish-sites) you will find that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x are more or less absent from the statistics.
Please note that even on your site, Netscape 6.x had a smaller market share than Netscape 3.x!!
"When IE comes with the OS why download a browser?"
Sure, but like I said, IE 6.0 when still only in beta and not bundled with anything, had a much higher market share than Mozilla and Netscape 6.x combined!
Out of that 17%, about 90% is Netscape 4.x. Check the stats from any "neutral" site such as news sites or generic business sites for example. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have almost completely failed to gain market share back. If anything, they have LOST market share even after NS 6.x came out. And IE 6.x had a much higher market share than NS 6.x and Mozilla combined even before Windows XP came out and IE 6.x was still in beta!
Disclaimer: I've owned a Palm IIIx and now own an iPAQ. For both, I used / use them extensively for email and accessing stuff on the web, etc.
I used to think it was a really important thing that the Palm IIIx could go about a month without changing batteries.. But the thing is: I have to sleep and while I sleep, the iPAQ recharges. It is never low on battery. It lasts for at least one day and I just put it on charging when I go to bed. If I use it for just basic calendar & task list functionality, it lasts about a week. When I travel, I just take the charger with me.. It's very light weight and is no problem at all. In countries with different electrical sockets than in Finland, I just use a plug converter that I'd bring along anyway.
As far as the size go.. I think people totally over estimate the size advantage of a Palm vs. Pocket PC devices. I use the same leather case for my iPAQ that I used for the Palm IIIx. In fact, I think the iPAQ might be a little thinner, but it's a tiny bit longer. Still fits the same cases without any problem. Toshibas Pocket PC device is *SMALLER* than a Palm IIIx.
The very latest Palm's are smaller than the IIIx, of course, but the difference isn't really so important because you want a case with the device anyway or you'll break the screen - Palm OR Pocket PC. With the case, they are roughly the same size.
But when it comes to features, Pocket PC devices are lightyears ahead of Palm. I saw AOL Instant Messenger at least half a year ago for Pocket PC! And these babies are so much more expandable! Just put in Socket Communication's Bluetooth CF card into a HP Jornada (it goes in all the way so that it doesn't make the device ANY bigger) and you can use your GPRS phone to be online 24/7. Or maybe a WLAN card.. Or an IBM 1GB Microdrive..
Pocket PC's Internet Explorer is pretty full featured and has support for all the typical features such as frames, JavaScript, 128 bit SSL etc.. It even supports Java applets and Flash thanks to Insignia Solutions Java VM and the Macromedia plugin. Adobe has a PDF viewer for Pocket PC and the OS itself comes bundled with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. And it's been like that for years.
Palm is *WAY* behind in features, bundled software, power and memory. Pocket PC 2002 is also a much more friendly OS for stylus based use, IMHO.
It's no wonder Palm's market share is free falling! I wish they would get with the program and get out their ARM based devices soon, and get some better color screens and OS, or they will be dead within a year! It's really sad too, cause Palm used to be a really innovative and cool company, much like Netscape. But just like Netscape, they haven't come out with anything compelling for years and years and Microsoft and Symbian is flying past them.
I know that "most people" do not use SSH or VNC etc.. And most people don't watch videos. I was talking about the "quality" (performance, potential etc.) of the devices. Palm OS is *SO* far behind and it doesn't look like they will be catching up anytime soon. The prices of a Sony CLIE are not much different from those of a Compaq iPAQ. Why would anyone want to go with the Palm OS device when they can get a 10 times more advanced device for practically the same price?! The answer is in the units sold statistics for 2001. People *are* in fact going from Palm OS devices to Pocket PC devices!
Sure, there Palm devices which are cheaper, but the screens are much worse quality and the included software is much more primitive and limited.
"In reality I would bet that their are 50 PalmOS related devices sold for every 1 CE/PocketPC device."
Well, I don't know where you live, but ZDNet writes this about Europe:
"A recent study by the England-based market researcher Context Integration, showed Palm's European market share had dipped from 59 percent in January 2000 to 55 percent in December.
By contrast, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, the two largest manufacturers of Pocket PC devices, combined for 31 percent of the European market at year's end, up from 18 percent at the start of 2000."
Not exactly "1 in 50" is it? Palm has fallen 4 percent units in just a year! They haven't come out with anything compelling since that, and there's nothing new on the radar to stop that trend. In fact, with all the new GSM & GPRS & Pocket PC combos and Pocket PC 2002, I expect the trend to continue even sharper. I'll be very surprised if Palm has over 40% market share by the end of 2002 in Europe.
The reason is pretty clear I think. I've had a Psion 3a, Palm IIIx and Compaq iPAQ and there's absolutely no comparison. The iPAQ is just so far ahead. There's Pocket Word and Excel, I can read PDF's with it, I can listen to mp3's on it, watch videos (not just short clips, thanks to the IBM microdrive and large CF cards), surf on the net with images, frames, 128 bit SSL, JavaScript *AND* Java applets with Insignia's Java VM. There's SSH for it and VNC to remotely use UNIX boxes, Windows Terminal Client to remotely use Windows 2000 workstations and the big difference to Palm is that even if these were available by title to Palm, the quality is in a different realm. On Pocket PC, these apps actually work perfectly like they do on a desktop PC. The CPU is so fast that there's no noticable slowdown when listening to an MP3 while surfing the net with a WLAN connection or always-on cellular connection using GPRS.
Palm does not even come close, and that's very, very sad. But it doesn't help to be kidding ourselves that "Palm is smart". Palm is sucking badly and this article proves that they are indeed in big trouble! The only Palm OS device I'd ever consider buying right now are the very latest Sony CLIE models. And even for those, it's mostly because of the cool design and the added software Sony has for them (like the programmable universal remote control).
This doesn't sound like the XBOY, of which there have been some rumors circulating for about a year now. This sounds bigger.. But the way the Slashdot article puts it "GBA competitor".. I don't know. The original ZDNet article makes it sound more like a super powered remote control or PDA - not a handheld game console..
Slashdot Mirror
All this talk about interference between WLAN and Bluetooth is more or less rubbish in my experience. Both at work and at home, I work every day with both Bluetooth and WLAN at the same time and I've never had any problems or slowdowns of either one. On my laptop, I have both and both are enabled at all times - no problems, ever. At work, just two rooms over from mine, people code Bluetooth code every day with several Bluetooth devices, some of which are experimental. The same office space has a WLAN network and nobody ever complains about interference.. *shrug*
"Copy-pasted" and then obviously modified it so that it would compile in C - such as not making a class out of the whole app, not passing a String[] to main(), not having main be "static" etc. :) Nothing essential such as the actual algorithm and math code was touched, however.
A non-programmer friend asked me a while back how you can "figure out" prime numbers with a computer program. So.. In order to show him the basic idea, I "pair programmed" a simple example that just started counting from 1 and up and then for each number, looped from 2 and up to half the original number to do a modulo on them. I implemented it in Java first.. The next day, a guy at work asked me why I had done it in Java.. So.. I copy-pasted the 20-or-so line code to C and compiled it. Standard compiler flags for both Java and C.. And I ran it.. and timed searching the first 100000 prime numbers. Java was about 10% faster and I wasn't even surprised.. Why? Cause this is exactly the kind of situation where Java can be faster than C. It's very easy to do a similar test yourself. Doesn't even have to be prime numbers. Just do whatever kind of random math you want and see for yourself. With the HotSpot virtual machine, things like this get optimized like crazy by the virtual machine. If you would compile it with all speed optimization flags, inlining methods etc.. I don't know - I'm guessing C would be a bit faster, but it would still be very close.. But don't take my word for it - try for yourself.
So compact flash sucks too because it's more expensive than CD's and incompatible? Dataplay discs are VERY small. That's the whole point. They are intended for digital cameras, PDA's and similar small, battery driven devices. Not PC's. Not even laptops.
Instead of focusing on being funny when submitting the article, how about focusing on being clued in?
I'm not saying that the Win NT / 2K / XP command line is as powerful as a UNIX one, of course, but:
1) Windows has tab completion. It's just not turned on by default. (Do help cmd from the shell in Win 2K (at least) to get a description of it. You can also configure the completion char to something other than tab..)
2) cat exists, it's called type
3) grep exists, it's called find. If find isn't sufficiently powerful for you, you can always get grep for Windows.
4) piping and redirection works more or less exactly like in UNIX with the same syntax even
Of course all of this stuff isn't as commonly used on Windows as it is in UNIX, but it doesn't mean that it's not there.
How about this?
r so ft.office.idg/
http://europe.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/07/23/mic
500,000 copies of Office 2001 for Macintosh for a price of around $400 each (depends on where you buy it) means they have brought in $200 million USD on just Office 2001 in about a year or so. MS Office 98 has sold 3.5 million copies so MS has brought in almost 1.5 *billion* USD on that product.
It's a cash cow for them.. Of course they are not discontinuing it!
I find it amusing how everyone thinks that everything Microsoft does is to capture and control the industry or to do whatever acts of evil. Did it occur to you that they are supporting Macintosh because they are selling huges amounts of software that way and thus making lots of money?
Well like some people have pointed out, similar systems exist. One of the main reasons that I'm doing this is as a mental exercise. Simply to DO IT. The fact that similar systems exist is just a "proof of concept" for me really.. It proves that the idea isn't totally crazy. :)
:)
With custom tags and flags for emails, you can set it up so that it's exactly like a traditional folder based email system. So the way I see it, it can only improve on existing email systems, as long as it performs well.. But that's part of the challenge => the fun.
I've been planning an email system that is based on searches rather than folders. The user interface might be "folders" but in reality, each "folder" is actually a search into an email database. This means a number of things. First of all, emails can exist in any number of folders (including no folder at all). Folders can have all kinds of "complex" rules such as "unread emails plus emails that have been read within the last 10 minutes". This would be a kind of "inbox", for example. Then there could be "Today's emails". "Yesterday's emails", "Emails from Firstname Lastname", "Work related email" and so on. Emails can be flagged using filters to help categorizing them. For example you could have a folder "work emails" that simply search for all emails that have a "work" flag set. The work flag would be set when the email arrives by checking if the email matches a set of rules (is from certain people, is to a certain email address, has a certain topic etc.).
The basic idea is to get powerful email management without having to actually manage "at runtime". Instead, the management happens by setting up folders and rules.
One implementation idea is to implement it as an IMAP server that one would run locally. That would allow people to use existing email clients with this system. I haven't decided about that yet though.
"I understand (and appreciate) the use of HTML for windows help; however there isn't anything you can't do in the help by using [JA]Script and CSS, and aside from ActiveX, that isn't anything that any other browser couldn't provide"
Yes, there is. Being able to embed the browser component into applications, just like it's any another widget. You can do that with Mozilla now, but not with Netscape 4.x.
"IPAQ (either running Windows or the complete Java replacement OS, the name of which escapes me at the moment)"
You are probably thinking about SaveJe (http://www.savaje.com/).
"and GSM [gsmworld.com] which run in North America at 1900 MHz as opposed to 800 MHz most everywhere else."
Partly correct. GSM in North America is indeed at 1900 MHz but elsewhere in the world it's 900 MHz and 1800 MHz. Your average "dual band" GSM phones work on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz, except for Nokia's 8890 which works at 900 and 1900 MHz. Tribands work on all three. I think there's another band used for GSM too in North America - 800 MHz (possibly 850 MHz) but I'm not 100% sure about that one.
A lot of people have answered in various ways but missed the main point I was making. The main point was: why should it be different than what it is for normal physical mail?
Someone mentioned an example where I send a nude photo from Finland to USA (legal in both Finland and USA). Then I went to Africa and got arrested cause in the country I went to, it was illegal. Why is that different in any way from if I had sent a nude PHYSICAL photo rather than a FILE? The physical photo travels from one country to another by car, train, plane or other means. The digital photo travels on the internet from server to server, router to router from one country to another, passing a number of countries on the way.
It is no different. Why should the Internet be considered some kind of other dimension that is not in "any country"? That does not reflect reality at all. In reality, the servers, routers etc. are in fact IN countries. There is nothing different from the Internet to normal mail, except for the speed of which data moves.
Kiddy porn isn't illegal on "The Internet" so it's fine to do it there. Right? Of course not!
Why do people think that the Internet is somehow a different place, outside of all nations. It's not. It's made up by servers and cables that are on the territories of real nations. It's used by people and companies who live in real nations. These people and companies are bound by normal laws. If I send kiddy porn from Finland to the USA over the Internet, why should it be any different than if I send it with normal mail and the pictures are physical?
Same thing in this case! The defence is completely brain dead!
I was in Japan a few months ago when FOMA was launched.. I played with both the iMode phones and the FOMA phone. Sure, they are nice, but really, technology wise, iMode & iAppli has nothing to offer that WAP and J2ME wouldn't already accomplish. Or let's say COULD. What you said about content quality is the key issue. Japanese content is good. In Europe, it's complete crap. It's not the fault of the technology tho, so I don't see how going iMode would change it.
"While this is great I suppose, I am surprised that they will not begin with the usual heavy-weight mobile-phone-friendly countries, such as Finland, Sweden.."
I live in Finland and I'm definitely a "first mover". Guess what? I wouldn't get an i-mode phone. I'm perfectly happy with my current GSM triple band, GPRS & Bluetooth capable Ericsson T68 (it has a color screen too and is very small). It works in just about every country in the world, USA included. My laptop and PDA connects to the internet with it, without any wires what so ever. GPRS is pretty cheap too (depending of course what you use it for). What extra would i-mode give me over the current phone and service that I have?
GSM & GPRS & SMS & WAP & J2ME are technology wise up there with i-mode. GSM gives you something that i-mode doesn't: it works just about anywhere in the world.
"From the looks of things Nokia has a decent shot of keeping Microsoft out of yet another business."
Yes.. Finns fighting Microsoft in the server & desktop OS area (Linux) and Finns fighting Microsoft in the mobile space (Nokia)..
"There is no such thing as a 'neutral' site."
Sure there is. Of course browsing habits and preferences vary but if you took CNN, BBC, Time magazine or a similar site and looked at their stats, you'd see something which is much closer to the actual average of all users than the ones you are seeing on your site, for example. I mean, you don't REALLY think that 27% of all WWW users surf with Netscape and that out of those, 52.3% would be using Mozilla. Personally I'd be surprised if 1% of WWW users have even HEARD of Mozilla!
This is not to say that Mozilla would not be a good brower - or going to be a good browser. That's a separate issue. I'm just saying that if you measure stats on "neutral" sites (or maybe average from 50 large neutralish-sites) you will find that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x are more or less absent from the statistics.
Please note that even on your site, Netscape 6.x had a smaller market share than Netscape 3.x!!
"When IE comes with the OS why download a browser?"
Sure, but like I said, IE 6.0 when still only in beta and not bundled with anything, had a much higher market share than Mozilla and Netscape 6.x combined!
Out of that 17%, about 90% is Netscape 4.x. Check the stats from any "neutral" site such as news sites or generic business sites for example. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have almost completely failed to gain market share back. If anything, they have LOST market share even after NS 6.x came out. And IE 6.x had a much higher market share than NS 6.x and Mozilla combined even before Windows XP came out and IE 6.x was still in beta!
Disclaimer: I've owned a Palm IIIx and now own an iPAQ. For both, I used / use them extensively for email and accessing stuff on the web, etc.
I used to think it was a really important thing that the Palm IIIx could go about a month without changing batteries.. But the thing is: I have to sleep and while I sleep, the iPAQ recharges. It is never low on battery. It lasts for at least one day and I just put it on charging when I go to bed. If I use it for just basic calendar & task list functionality, it lasts about a week. When I travel, I just take the charger with me.. It's very light weight and is no problem at all. In countries with different electrical sockets than in Finland, I just use a plug converter that I'd bring along anyway.
As far as the size go.. I think people totally over estimate the size advantage of a Palm vs. Pocket PC devices. I use the same leather case for my iPAQ that I used for the Palm IIIx. In fact, I think the iPAQ might be a little thinner, but it's a tiny bit longer. Still fits the same cases without any problem. Toshibas Pocket PC device is *SMALLER* than a Palm IIIx.
The very latest Palm's are smaller than the IIIx, of course, but the difference isn't really so important because you want a case with the device anyway or you'll break the screen - Palm OR Pocket PC. With the case, they are roughly the same size.
But when it comes to features, Pocket PC devices are lightyears ahead of Palm. I saw AOL Instant Messenger at least half a year ago for Pocket PC! And these babies are so much more expandable! Just put in Socket Communication's Bluetooth CF card into a HP Jornada (it goes in all the way so that it doesn't make the device ANY bigger) and you can use your GPRS phone to be online 24/7. Or maybe a WLAN card.. Or an IBM 1GB Microdrive..
Pocket PC's Internet Explorer is pretty full featured and has support for all the typical features such as frames, JavaScript, 128 bit SSL etc.. It even supports Java applets and Flash thanks to Insignia Solutions Java VM and the Macromedia plugin. Adobe has a PDF viewer for Pocket PC and the OS itself comes bundled with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. And it's been like that for years.
Palm is *WAY* behind in features, bundled software, power and memory. Pocket PC 2002 is also a much more friendly OS for stylus based use, IMHO.
It's no wonder Palm's market share is free falling! I wish they would get with the program and get out their ARM based devices soon, and get some better color screens and OS, or they will be dead within a year! It's really sad too, cause Palm used to be a really innovative and cool company, much like Netscape. But just like Netscape, they haven't come out with anything compelling for years and years and Microsoft and Symbian is flying past them.
I know that "most people" do not use SSH or VNC etc.. And most people don't watch videos. I was talking about the "quality" (performance, potential etc.) of the devices. Palm OS is *SO* far behind and it doesn't look like they will be catching up anytime soon. The prices of a Sony CLIE are not much different from those of a Compaq iPAQ. Why would anyone want to go with the Palm OS device when they can get a 10 times more advanced device for practically the same price?! The answer is in the units sold statistics for 2001. People *are* in fact going from Palm OS devices to Pocket PC devices!
Sure, there Palm devices which are cheaper, but the screens are much worse quality and the included software is much more primitive and limited.
"In reality I would bet that their are 50 PalmOS related devices sold for every 1 CE/PocketPC device."
Well, I don't know where you live, but ZDNet writes this about Europe:
"A recent study by the England-based market researcher Context Integration, showed Palm's European market share had dipped from 59 percent in January 2000 to 55 percent in December.
By contrast, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, the two largest manufacturers of Pocket PC devices, combined for 31 percent of the European market at year's end, up from 18 percent at the start of 2000."
Not exactly "1 in 50" is it? Palm has fallen 4 percent units in just a year! They haven't come out with anything compelling since that, and there's nothing new on the radar to stop that trend. In fact, with all the new GSM & GPRS & Pocket PC combos and Pocket PC 2002, I expect the trend to continue even sharper. I'll be very surprised if Palm has over 40% market share by the end of 2002 in Europe.
The reason is pretty clear I think. I've had a Psion 3a, Palm IIIx and Compaq iPAQ and there's absolutely no comparison. The iPAQ is just so far ahead. There's Pocket Word and Excel, I can read PDF's with it, I can listen to mp3's on it, watch videos (not just short clips, thanks to the IBM microdrive and large CF cards), surf on the net with images, frames, 128 bit SSL, JavaScript *AND* Java applets with Insignia's Java VM. There's SSH for it and VNC to remotely use UNIX boxes, Windows Terminal Client to remotely use Windows 2000 workstations and the big difference to Palm is that even if these were available by title to Palm, the quality is in a different realm. On Pocket PC, these apps actually work perfectly like they do on a desktop PC. The CPU is so fast that there's no noticable slowdown when listening to an MP3 while surfing the net with a WLAN connection or always-on cellular connection using GPRS.
Palm does not even come close, and that's very, very sad. But it doesn't help to be kidding ourselves that "Palm is smart". Palm is sucking badly and this article proves that they are indeed in big trouble! The only Palm OS device I'd ever consider buying right now are the very latest Sony CLIE models. And even for those, it's mostly because of the cool design and the added software Sony has for them (like the programmable universal remote control).
This doesn't sound like the XBOY, of which there have been some rumors circulating for about a year now. This sounds bigger.. But the way the Slashdot article puts it "GBA competitor".. I don't know. The original ZDNet article makes it sound more like a super powered remote control or PDA - not a handheld game console..
"Well my initial response was yeah microsoft sucks, good for them for making crappy hardware."
Of course Microsoft doesn't even make the XBOX. Flextronics does.