On March 19, 2008 10:57:23 am Keith Major | Aquarius Telecom Inc. wrote: > Looks interesting. Personally, I have been watching the Access Linux > Platform as I have been a Palm O/S user since 2002.
I too am a huge fan of Palm, but let's be honest... they dropped the ball so many times now that only the true die-hards would believe they'll recover. Palm's great return (now ALP) has been vaporware for so long that it's competing with Duke Nukum Forever. :-) I've given up on Palm being able to provide anything close to the dream. I'm now pursuing Palm emulation on Linux. Whether it's a PalmOS emulator on an N800-type device, iPhone or OpenMoko, I don't care. It's one of my projects to turn something like POSE into WINE: a transparent environment for Palm apps. > I know things have come a long way since 2003 and if OpenMoko can bring > together the right mix of fun, business, compatibility, expandability and > innovation then I would love to evaluate it, add it to my belt and replace > 2 devices with one. Everything released since 2003 hasn't been innovative > enough including the iphone which is very close to what I would purchase > but, where is the document compatibility? (and I don’t want to buy a Mac or > itunes) Amen. That's why I'm looking to OpenMoko. I'm not interested in a "safe" java execution environment like Android; I don't want to be limited. Sell me the hardware. Give me the ability to talk to the hardware and a basic set of GPL libraries that I will fix or route around as I discover damage; that's all. > OpenMoko looks pretty and fun but, it's missing things that it will need to > be successful. Hopefully the offer made at the end of the video to > developers will drive the innovation this market segment needs to make this > product successful - that's the benefit of open source and the potential > for this product to be better than others. Pretty? It's missing aesthetics, that's for sure. What's with such huge curves? Useless waste of space, IMO. I chuckled at the "geeks have taste too" comment on the tartan print OpenMoko... Yeah, sure we do. That's why almost all of us have wives or girlfriends who we've completely handed all style-related decisions to. :-) > That's my rant on smartphones for now. Your rants and mine are very much in line. Essentially "Give me something that works well, and don't prevent me from being able to make it better." Actually I had a conversation with a Telus "business applications manager" at the airport recently. She was talking to someone else all about how they're working closely with Microsoft to develop mobile office tools to make lives easier and allow people to do whatever they need with their mobile phone. After a few minutes of her showing off the stuff on her HTC phone I told her that I was one of those rogue factions that replaced the firmware on those phones with software that didn't lock me in to their way of doing things. "Oh you're one of those people who give away their software and stuff?" she asked, wide-eyed. I admitted as much and offered an explanation which focused on examples of how traditional business software doesn't work for everyone, the mass frustration with security and never-seem-to-be-important bugs in software such as Outlook and the endless upgrade treadmill. That led into my expressing my frustration with having to change how I do business because the company making my business software decides there's a new best way to work and not giving me a way to keep the old way that's worked just fine for me and I've already paid for. She made some comment insinuating how she wouldn't be able to eat if she gave away her source, to which I replied that not only was I returning from a contract where the company was making money hand-over-fist with open-source software (and has been for many years), but also my hourly rate was certainly nothing to sneeze at. "Us evil haxors have families to feed, too, and most of us have no trouble doing so" was one of the last things I mentioned before heading down the gate. It blew me away that someone in an industry that is all about giving away software and selling the service just could not get their head around the fact that a) 99% of the people using it won't be able to make use of the source code and will be happy with whatever you give them, b) probably 25% of the people who really know what they want will now be able to either change it themselves, develop applications on top of your framework or hire someone to do it, and c) reduce their own development and support overhead by tapping in to the global community, most of whom are more than happy to share solutions they've found. *sigh* one can dream. -A. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
