As many of you are no doubt aware, the manufactures are in a bit of a spot over the connectivity solutions.
On the one hand they want to provide something, but on the other is the whole issues of costs. If they are going to provide a solution, they can just about aford do one. The volumes are not high and they can not pay for it in volume sales. One solution probably means PC and is likely to be limited in scope becuase of the cost(time) taken to develop it. Ask yourselves, how much would you pay for software. As has been pointed out, if you pay sub $400 for a TX, then you are unlikely to pay much more than $200 for software and you would expect quite a bit from it. A manufacture has also to think about language (locale) support and is not even going to think about Palm, which may be ok for US but not Europe. Sure, a web type interface would be nice, but how much is that going to add to the software cost for a TX and how much more would you be willing to pay for it. Adding 802.11 or Bluetooth may not appear to cost much, but these units (TXes) are sold in small volumes so the hardware cost gets higher. (FWIW, Ericsson do a BT module for circa $10 but expect sales in 1,000,000s). A similar argument applies for mass storage add ons. How much can a manufacture afford in the BOM to add PC card, or memory stick or whatever when they are already cutting costs. Many provide serial comms as a cheap method of adding something to the units. here almost all of them fail is in publishing this info in the public domain. In all liklihood, publishing the info will not dent their sales of PC software as most of us would rather have the manufactures software instead of someone elses (this falls over if they produce bad, buggy, low feature software that isn't maintained of course!). The same problem faces the mobile market. A smart phone needs connectivity software. Manufactures can aford perhaps up to 1$ per hand set to pay for it, but you want lots from it. Worse, you want to be able to move data between different handsets, your PDA, your PC (running windoze or Linux or whatever). The solution in the mobile space, is specialist companies who only do connectivity software. I think the same could prevail in the TX space. A small company could create a package tht handles most TXes and even take a stab and transfering data between units, as you upgrade or transfer a setup to someone else. Ok, it would not be perfect, but a start. The comms and storage would be reasonably common - as common as in mobile sync solutions, and if they can do it, then it could be done for TXes. However, I want something for my MPX4000 and that is what shall do. If others want it, then great, but if MPX bring something reasonable to market first, I would prefer that. -- Veronica Merryfield, somewhere in Cambridgeshire, UK "The best things in life aren't things" RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
