At 09:33 PM 3/1/00 -0800, you wrote:
>That's a pretty hard question. We've only looked at wireless options in
>terms of vertical markets (fitting a specific need). We ended up going
>external wireless modem instead of Palm VII. Now that Palm has dropped
>the price of the VII and started offering an unlimited access service
>plan, I'm not as sure that we would make the same choice.
I was doing raw serial connectivity - when I went wireless, the service
price points drove me to a Minstrel. CDPD coverage is good where I live
and work, but lousy in a lot of places I've travelled to demonstrate my
apps. The VII coverage is much better.
> From what I can tell, none of the wireless setups has developed an
>especially large installed base. Most vendors seem to be promising to
>support both.
The problem is coverage and economy. You really need a fixed-priced model
for this to fly. That's hurt the VII (don't know how the new price model
is working out, I would assume it's improving things a lot).
> From a programming point of view it also a complicated decision. Palm
>VII 'PQAs' are pretty trivial to develop, but it is quite a bit of
>effort to get the unit to do anything besides web clipping. On the
>other hand, wireless modems give you a more flexible socket interface to
>the outside world, but you are basically working from scratch (no built
>in browser support, etc.)
Consider this - Minstrel-type solutions allow you to do a connected-type
applications (I know, lazy for wireless developers, but good for
prototypes). VII is a connectionless model, which had advantages of
handling things like short-term carrier drops, at a cost of increased work
on the server side (unless you can do it all in a PQA, but some
applications don't lend themselves to this model).
>Frankly, I expect to see lots of changes in wireless over the next 18
>months or so. I read a blurb somewhere that said that Palm demonstrated
>Bluetooth technology at CeBIT.
Bluetooth is good for a short-range (10 meter max) solution. Downside:
conflicts with other protocols such as 802.11 (used in wireless ethernet
cards like those from Aironet). The programming interface supposedly looks
like IrDA, I hope we can do IP on top of it.
In truth, it's all in the apps that are available, really.
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