Hi, All:
I have the following 3 questions on Visor:
1.Does anybody know if HandSpring is going to have a new
POSE that can emulate
both Palms (3Com's palm and Visor) hardwares?
2. Will KVM runs on Visor just as fine as PalmV?
3. Will HandSpring support (or plan to support) the Wireless
feature /pqa as PalmVII does?
Any answer will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
--Xiaowen Wang
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 1999 3:15 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Visor hardware differences
Sergio Carvalho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Well, I was not worrying too much with USB, as it is a serial connection,
and
> may thus be masked by PalmOS, or the microphone which doesn't affect
current
> applications. Differences in key handling worried me, because the docs say
> they're important enough to prevent the emulator from working.
The emulator really emulates the hardware at a pretty low level. The
OS, which talks to all this hardware, is in the ROM. They've got to
match for the tango to work. It's thus no surprise that a
Visor-specific ROM doesn't work on POSE, any more than it'd work if
you flashed that ROM onto a card and dropped it into a Pro. I expect
Handspring to work on patches and/or alternate versions of the
emulator to make developers happy.
Palm has been really open with information about their hardware design
- enough that they release the source code of an app that emulates
almost all of it and the OS that deals with almost all of it
(fascinating little hardware-only bits of power management, for
example, aren't touched by either). I hope that other licensees will
be as good about this. I don't know about Symbol; Motorola wasn't very
good with their pager card, but that seems to have been an
under-funded project all around. Handspring is approaching a broader
market than either of those two, which should encourage them to open
up to developers a bit more.
You're right that it's the OS's job to provide the abstract interface
to things like the serial port (though I hope you don't just say that
because of the word 'serial' in USB), but if you're going to trust
them to abstract the serial port and the mic in such a way that they
don't hurt your app, you should trust that they're going to abstract
the keys in the same manner.
Unless, of course, your apps don't use the abstractions, in which
case.... "try again, grasshopper".*
- Nathan
* Zen of Palm seems non-violent. Maybe it's time for an alternative
philosophy which provides for some nice medieval punishments for not
using the abstractions.
