Yeah, after researching the Palm VII, we decided to go with the OmniSky
solution first. Ping/Polling makes for awkward user experiences with the
transmission slowness and latency. I just started the OmniSky port. I'm
hoping to open a socket to the server and leave it open for minutes or
hours. Push & Pull should happen easily and naturally, without alot of
polling, etc. At least, that's the theory. I'll know better after I get it
working.
Do you know why the Palm VII has that long antenna? Other devices using the
same technology and network have smaller, fixed antennae. It would be
interesting to find out.
At 11:28 AM 4/20/00 -0400, you wrote:
> > 2. I _am_ saying that the Palm VII wireless architecture makes sense only
> > for a very small portion of what we're going to want to do with wireless.
>
> > Ok, it lets us query the web for information. But it doesn't let us send
> > important breaking information to the user. (How do I know to query for a
> > "server is down!" message? It also doesn't let us create an interactive
> > 2-way dialog with the wireless user (eg, a chat application or a networked
> > game.) The RIM, which has its own problems, _does_ allow this stuff and I
> > hope Palm learns from it. Since Palm and RIM use the same wireless
> network,
> > it shouldn't be that difficult a switch.
>
>Technically you could have an app ping the server, and I don't know
>what the palm.net timeout is, but you could have it leave the socket
>open until it got something.
>
>If you are interacting, you can do the interactive stuff with periodic
>pulls. The other consideration is try it assuming one of the original
>two pricing plans Palm had.
>
>In the sense that the wireless world has moved on, palm should revisit
>the VII, but in one sense they are doing so through OmniSky.
>
> > 3. There are 2 things that the Palm VII is lacking.
> > A. The ability to push data to the Pilot, from the server.
> This is
> > necessary to save bandwidth and to increase performance on _interactive_
> > networked applications.
> > B. The "Pager" ability to turn on in response to an incoming
> > message and run the appropriate application. For many, many vertical
> market
> > applications, this is the whole point. (I'll look into the Alert hack
> > below, but it should really be a feature, not a workaround.)
>
>Actually, OmniSky does both. There are other negatives, but you can
>leave a listening socket around and it has the messaging light (though
>mine has never worked - but there may have been other problems).
>
>Technically the Minstrel doesn't "turn on", but has a sleep mode where
>it still listens. But the battery seems to last as long in the
>minstrel as it does in the PalmV.
>
> > Palm could easily create a Palm VIIx with an altered version of the
> > Palm.net service that could do this stuff. They just need to hear from us
> > that we need it.
>
>Basically you would have to have the antenna up and radio on all the time.
>
> > BTW, even after the NASDAQ slide, RIMM is valued at ~2.7 billion dollars.
> > It's not a teeny company. :-)
>
>Don't confuse market cap with book value. USPIX is up after the slide.
>
> > I'm glad this discussion is happening. Who knows? Maybe we can help Palm
> > win the wireless game. Even if Palm doesn't listen, maybe we can get what
> > we need from Handspring modules (someday.)
>
>
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