Vince Mulhollon wrote:
On 11/14/2001 09:39:54 AM Edward Betts wrote:
Vince Mulhollon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Another way of looking at it, is my three year old palm pilot with 10
meg
memory expansion card comes within 1 to 10 percent of those various
specs,
and it meets all my needs, so what is to gain by upgrading? I'll
never
know the difference if it sorts my address book in 1 ns instead of 1
ms.
That's why there's been approximately no technological progress in
palmtops
for a couple years, no demand.
NO DEMAND? I for one am very much looking forward to the day I can watch
full
colour hi-res movies trailers streaming in real-time over the net to my
PDA.
You can do that now, given alot of money and a winCE handheld from the last three years.
I admit my error, sales (and returns) of those products seem to indicate the demand is merely extremely low, as opposed to no demand. However, demand seems quite high for the Palm pilot machines. Its one of those interesting commodity products where higher tech does not equal higher sales.
However, look at the economics of watching trailers on a PDA. A movie is considered successful here if 1% of the population views it. By definition, the other 99% don't think it's worth paying $10. I think it would be a hard sell to convince the 99% that watching a small portion of the movie (the trailer) on a tiny little screen with tinny sound is worth purchasing several hundred dollars of equipment, if the entire movie on a giant screen and great sound isn't even worth $10 to them. Of course if you could watch those trailers for free or for $1 worth of equipment, maybe that would be a killer app.
Back on the subject of Debian stuff, for similar reasons, I don't think porting emacs to a palm III is going to be a killer app. But if someone could port KDE to a PDA, and get kmail working usefully on the PDA, that might be a killer app. After all, people pay $100 a month for those little blackberry two way email pagers, I'm sure those same people would prefer to pay less for a Debian based solution with a bigger screen...
On the other hand, very few people are paying $5 to cellphone providers to "surf the web" on their telephones, so I'd assume a linux based wireless web browser would tank in the market, so there's little point in porting lynx to a Debian based PDA.
IPAQ running intimate (debian for the ipaq see http://intimate.handhelds.org) has working kde and I believe kmail although I bet the interface needs to be reworked for the screen size. This along with a 802.11b card makes for a great handheld within AP range. Granted the IPAQ is a bit expensive but if you want to sacrifice for price you can get a 3150 (BW screen) for cheap. The sound isn't bad
if you use headphones and there is a movie player although I haven't checked it out yet.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sam Tetherow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Director of Development NIC Labs (PSST)
