On Friday 20 April 2007 09:16, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: > I would suspect: size, matching interfaces, availability, cost of > additional components?
When I worked on similar things, cost and updates were the two main reasons. Sizewise often there wasn't such a big difference, cost was very important. You can save much more by spreading cost of SW development over a large number of units, HW savings by large order discounts are much smaller. The other reason was you can update the firmware often, if you expect interoperability issues, standard changes, or simply improvements. Having separate flash chips or update methods is really a pain, a central software repository is much cleaner. In the case of GPS the improvement factor is actually a very plausible reason (or at least would be if we had info on the raw data) - you can always think up ways to increase precision with neat tricks if you have access to the raw data. Imagine something like the .RAW/.CRW files in digicams. They contain proprietary data, but have more information than your distilled jpeg file, so if you think up a way which extracts this information better, you will end up with a higher quality image. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
