"Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation."
Hehehehe...they said "one handed operation"...
Anywho...regardless the Treo is as much PDA as Phone so at the upper end of the smartphone spectrum its more PDA like where the middle tier of the smartphone market is more phone like.
The official run down from Steve Jobs as to the advantage of using OS X in iPhone.
Video
Cocoa
Core Animation
Graphics
Audio
Syncing
Networking
Multi-Tasking
Power Management
Security
Quote:
A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation.
Using this definition anything you get from a mobile phone carrier is a smartphone. While a device you buy independent of a mobile phone carrier that is not primarily used as a phone is a PDA.
Perhaps because an OS designed for the desktop with desktop processors and desktop graphics support likely isn't going to run all that well on a PDA class machine without changes?
Yes, sure. But that's what optimization is all about. NEXTSTEP (Mach 2.5++ kernel, BSD4.3, "Cocoa", Display Postscript) ran on 66 MHz Intel 486 CPUs with 32 MB of RAM and an OS install on the order of 250 MB. Color me unsurprised that a version of Leopard can run on ARM hardware.
If you're saying that OS X can't be OS X without Finder.app, Carbon APIs, the usual installed apps, drivers, and other features not needed nor suited for a small screen, we can stop now since we have a different appreciation of what constitutes and operating system.
1. iPhone appears to have a Cocoa UI with CoreAnimation. It runs CoverFlow. So, large chunks of Quartz, CoreFoundation, CoreBlahBlahBlah are there.
2. It obviously has an optimized WebKit powering Safari, Mail, Widgets and probably the Google maps application
3. If it has a Quartz powered UI with Cocoa for app development, dollars to donuts, the development environment for it is Xcode to build it and Interface Builder to build the UI. Wdigets will likely also be built with a version of Dashcode.
4. If it is Leopard Cocoa, than it has Objective C with garbage collection
5. It has a considerable portion of the BSD network stack if it can seamlessly transfer between WiFi networking and EDGE networking
6. I would be curious what filesystem it has and if it is user accessible. Like in Safari and downloading files.
7. If there is a page file, would you be convinced? I do wonder myself if a page file is even necessary for the iPhone.
Quote:
Yes, it has a bunch of storage since its also an iPod. But the limitations of battery life and form factor tells you the general CPU capacity for the device. Now for the kernel that's probably not that big a deal to make lightweight. How much usable memory the processor has is also subject to conjecture.
I'm running Panther on a 500 MHz iBook with 256 MB RAM. For iPhone, its processing power isn't that far away from this, and probably better in some instances due to dedicated video hardware.
For memory on the iPhone, 64 MB DRAM is obviously doable since the iPod has it. I'd imagine a 128 MB DRAM chip is also cheaper than dirt. Running the OS straight off flash? Not likely.
Quote:
Well, embedded development isn't rocket science (except when it is) but it does take a little bit of effort to transition from desktop to palmtop development. There are also "rules of thumb" that embedded devs have that aren't common to desktop devs. These are less and less important...especially as you get to use "managed" code (either java or C#) but you do need more knowledge of the underlying hardware to get good performance out of a device than you do on a desktop.
Even with managed code knowing how the JIT compiler optimizes tells you how to layout code so the optimizer has a better shot at optimizing can mean the difference between usable and dog slow. Most desktop devs wont know and really there's no reason for them to.
/shrug
As I said, this isn't rocket science. But there are a lot more devs that know Java and C# than know ObjC so the pool of folks to fiddle with Windows Mobile and other embedded OS are pretty large in comparison to OSX.
It seems to me you are speaking from experience, not some advantage the "maturity" of tools could give you.
Heh, don't get me wrong...all the stuff I know is 5+ years out of date by now. Today I have a Mac Pro and have CPU cycles to burn. Relatively speaking so do PDAs so yes, the XNU is likely lightweight enough to work but Mach has never been sprightly.
Its just that I recall rumors (aka pipe dreams) that Leopard was going to use L4 kernel around the time Tevanian left Apple and I can imagine that even with investment into the XNU Mach 3/BSD hybrid there's some interest in newer microkernels. A lightweight version of OSX that is single user with no security issues would fit very well with L4's limitations/strengths. People were pointing at the Darbat project back when but given that the L4 world as small as the Haskell world (who?) and nobody has had a sniff of any Apple interest its got nearly zero probability of truth.
I still can't help but think that someone would have an urge to tinker with new concepts on a new platform. It IS still slimmer than a desktop and fiddling with the architecture itself is where you can get real performance gains over optimization.
But I'm picking nits here. If it looks the same at the API level who (but a handful of folks) really care?
Add to that the ability to have the apps on someone else's server al la google apps and now photoshop. You could access the web via wifi modify your spreadsheet, collaborate on a document all while listening to your itunes music.
Blows the mind!
Always available apps no need to download. The future of .mac? (google apps and photoshop rolled in?)
Add some phone functionality and a few nifty features and boom!
Will the iPhone have voice dialing? As much as I want this phone, I don't want to die on the road trying to find a phone number with my finger when I could easily say "call bob".
People need to think through the possibilities an always-connected device brings. Take a picture and it immediately gets forwarded to your home computer or server. Same for video, email, contacts, calendars, etc. Think Mapquest and Google Earth but mobile. Want to look up a word in the dictionary? Just go to the web. Want to watch tv? A few seconds and you are watching. Video conferencing? You bet. PDAs and smartphones cannot do all this. Nor do they have the interface to enable it.
I've been doing almost all of this with my Windows Mobile based phones for years now. The only thing I haven't done that's listed above is sending pictures and videos accessible to my home computer (not because I can't, simply because I just don't) and video conferncing (again, not because I can't but simply because I don't).
Video conferencing is impossible with the iPhone. Not only because it's stuck with GPRS in it's current state, but because it's missing a front-facing camera. How are you going to have a video phone call if you have to turn the phone around so that the other person can see you but then you can't see them. These have been available on WM devices for over a year now just for video telephony.
Quote:
Originally Posted by visionary
The iPhone defines a whole new class of computers. I think it will take some time and a few iterations to come into its own, not to mention the rollout of something like WiMax, but it will rule the Frontier as the quickest gun in the West.
This is a real bad point for Apple. I can see why the courted Verizon before AT&T. AT&T hasn't done a decent job of rolling out WCDMA yet. How they plan on rolling out WiMax in the next five years is beyond me. At this point they should cut off any future WCDMA expansion and focus solely on WiMax if they have any hopes of catching up to Sprint, who will start turning on WiMax towers later this year.
The bottom line is that aside from the multi-touch interface and browser, the iPhone brings nothing new to mobile phone market.
The browser has already been countered by Microsoft's Deepfish project (which, honestly, Pocket IE was in dire need of a kick in the pants so thanks to Apple for that). I've been able to do everything you say a iPhone will do for over three years now on my various WM based cell phones. MP3 player, streaming video, maps, web browsing, calendar/contact synchronization, you name it.
The only thing I haven't been able to do is use more than one finger on the screen. I meaqn, even thunderhawk has allowed me to view full html web pages for a fee. If any of you think that you're going to view full web pages over a GPRS connection without some sort of proxy service, I would recommend that you all invest in something else to do whle your web page is loading, like a nintendo ds. Not a psp. Then you'll have like 2X the loading times.
"Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation."
Hehehehe...they said "one handed operation"...
Anywho...regardless the Treo is as much PDA as Phone so at the upper end of the smartphone spectrum its more PDA like where the middle tier of the smartphone market is more phone like.
Vinea
In the real world, we use the phrases 'PDA', 'Smart Devices' and 'Smart Phones'.
Smart devices would be full-fledged touch-screen PDA's with phone functionality. The iPhone would fall in to the Smart Device catergory, along with PocketPC Phone Edition, Palm OS and Symbian.
Smartphone is mostly used to just refer to PocketPC Smartphone edition. These are the stripped-down, no touchs screen devices meant for one-handed operation.
Comments
How are you differentiating the PDA from the smartphone?
By not having phone functionality?
By not having phone functionality?
Yah...Gartner has a more verbose definition:
"Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation."
Hehehehe...they said "one handed operation"...
Anywho...regardless the Treo is as much PDA as Phone so at the upper end of the smartphone spectrum its more PDA like where the middle tier of the smartphone market is more phone like.
Vinea
Video
Cocoa
Core Animation
Graphics
Audio
Syncing
Networking
Multi-Tasking
Power Management
Security
A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation.
Using this definition anything you get from a mobile phone carrier is a smartphone. While a device you buy independent of a mobile phone carrier that is not primarily used as a phone is a PDA.
Perhaps because an OS designed for the desktop with desktop processors and desktop graphics support likely isn't going to run all that well on a PDA class machine without changes?
Yes, sure. But that's what optimization is all about. NEXTSTEP (Mach 2.5++ kernel, BSD4.3, "Cocoa", Display Postscript) ran on 66 MHz Intel 486 CPUs with 32 MB of RAM and an OS install on the order of 250 MB. Color me unsurprised that a version of Leopard can run on ARM hardware.
If you're saying that OS X can't be OS X without Finder.app, Carbon APIs, the usual installed apps, drivers, and other features not needed nor suited for a small screen, we can stop now since we have a different appreciation of what constitutes and operating system.
1. iPhone appears to have a Cocoa UI with CoreAnimation. It runs CoverFlow. So, large chunks of Quartz, CoreFoundation, CoreBlahBlahBlah are there.
2. It obviously has an optimized WebKit powering Safari, Mail, Widgets and probably the Google maps application
3. If it has a Quartz powered UI with Cocoa for app development, dollars to donuts, the development environment for it is Xcode to build it and Interface Builder to build the UI. Wdigets will likely also be built with a version of Dashcode.
4. If it is Leopard Cocoa, than it has Objective C with garbage collection
5. It has a considerable portion of the BSD network stack if it can seamlessly transfer between WiFi networking and EDGE networking
6. I would be curious what filesystem it has and if it is user accessible. Like in Safari and downloading files.
7. If there is a page file, would you be convinced? I do wonder myself if a page file is even necessary for the iPhone.
Yes, it has a bunch of storage since its also an iPod. But the limitations of battery life and form factor tells you the general CPU capacity for the device. Now for the kernel that's probably not that big a deal to make lightweight. How much usable memory the processor has is also subject to conjecture.
I'm running Panther on a 500 MHz iBook with 256 MB RAM. For iPhone, its processing power isn't that far away from this, and probably better in some instances due to dedicated video hardware.
For memory on the iPhone, 64 MB DRAM is obviously doable since the iPod has it. I'd imagine a 128 MB DRAM chip is also cheaper than dirt. Running the OS straight off flash? Not likely.
Well, embedded development isn't rocket science (except when it is) but it does take a little bit of effort to transition from desktop to palmtop development. There are also "rules of thumb" that embedded devs have that aren't common to desktop devs. These are less and less important...especially as you get to use "managed" code (either java or C#) but you do need more knowledge of the underlying hardware to get good performance out of a device than you do on a desktop.
Even with managed code knowing how the JIT compiler optimizes tells you how to layout code so the optimizer has a better shot at optimizing can mean the difference between usable and dog slow. Most desktop devs wont know and really there's no reason for them to.
/shrug
As I said, this isn't rocket science. But there are a lot more devs that know Java and C# than know ObjC so the pool of folks to fiddle with Windows Mobile and other embedded OS are pretty large in comparison to OSX.
It seems to me you are speaking from experience, not some advantage the "maturity" of tools could give you.
Its just that I recall rumors (aka pipe dreams) that Leopard was going to use L4 kernel around the time Tevanian left Apple and I can imagine that even with investment into the XNU Mach 3/BSD hybrid there's some interest in newer microkernels. A lightweight version of OSX that is single user with no security issues would fit very well with L4's limitations/strengths. People were pointing at the Darbat project back when but given that the L4 world as small as the Haskell world (who?) and nobody has had a sniff of any Apple interest its got nearly zero probability of truth.
http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/darbat/
I still can't help but think that someone would have an urge to tinker with new concepts on a new platform. It IS still slimmer than a desktop and fiddling with the architecture itself is where you can get real performance gains over optimization.
But I'm picking nits here. If it looks the same at the API level who (but a handful of folks) really care?
So what do you all think? Do you see what I see?
Absofrickinlutely.
Add to that the ability to have the apps on someone else's server al la google apps and now photoshop. You could access the web via wifi modify your spreadsheet, collaborate on a document all while listening to your itunes music.
Blows the mind!
Always available apps no need to download. The future of .mac? (google apps and photoshop rolled in?)
Add some phone functionality and a few nifty features and boom!
you got it.
No the girl in Vodafone lied. I said do you Vodafone have the whole country covered 3G-wise?
She replied, oh why yes of course, and she seemsed like she knew her stuff. Her commission must have gotten the better of her.
How could you just believe a hotline girl without doing research by yourself in the Internet?
Here in Germany maybe 60 % of the area are covered with 3G. Plus 3G devices consume a lot more energy.
Also, will it have an fm radio built-in as well?
But just like the iPod didn't come into its own until iTunes, so too the iPhone will not come into its own until we have mobile always-on broadband
Just as the iPod needed iTunes to grow into the mega-monster it is, so to the handheld computer.
iTunes was available before the iPod. The iPod became a monster when it became available for Windows. Are you referring to the iTunes store?
People need to think through the possibilities an always-connected device brings. Take a picture and it immediately gets forwarded to your home computer or server. Same for video, email, contacts, calendars, etc. Think Mapquest and Google Earth but mobile. Want to look up a word in the dictionary? Just go to the web. Want to watch tv? A few seconds and you are watching. Video conferencing? You bet. PDAs and smartphones cannot do all this. Nor do they have the interface to enable it.
I've been doing almost all of this with my Windows Mobile based phones for years now. The only thing I haven't done that's listed above is sending pictures and videos accessible to my home computer (not because I can't, simply because I just don't) and video conferncing (again, not because I can't but simply because I don't).
Video conferencing is impossible with the iPhone. Not only because it's stuck with GPRS in it's current state, but because it's missing a front-facing camera. How are you going to have a video phone call if you have to turn the phone around so that the other person can see you but then you can't see them. These have been available on WM devices for over a year now just for video telephony.
The iPhone defines a whole new class of computers. I think it will take some time and a few iterations to come into its own, not to mention the rollout of something like WiMax, but it will rule the Frontier as the quickest gun in the West.
This is a real bad point for Apple. I can see why the courted Verizon before AT&T. AT&T hasn't done a decent job of rolling out WCDMA yet. How they plan on rolling out WiMax in the next five years is beyond me. At this point they should cut off any future WCDMA expansion and focus solely on WiMax if they have any hopes of catching up to Sprint, who will start turning on WiMax towers later this year.
The bottom line is that aside from the multi-touch interface and browser, the iPhone brings nothing new to mobile phone market.
The browser has already been countered by Microsoft's Deepfish project (which, honestly, Pocket IE was in dire need of a kick in the pants so thanks to Apple for that). I've been able to do everything you say a iPhone will do for over three years now on my various WM based cell phones. MP3 player, streaming video, maps, web browsing, calendar/contact synchronization, you name it.
The only thing I haven't been able to do is use more than one finger on the screen. I meaqn, even thunderhawk has allowed me to view full html web pages for a fee. If any of you think that you're going to view full web pages over a GPRS connection without some sort of proxy service, I would recommend that you all invest in something else to do whle your web page is loading, like a nintendo ds. Not a psp. Then you'll have like 2X the loading times.
Yah...Gartner has a more verbose definition:
"Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation."
Hehehehe...they said "one handed operation"...
Anywho...regardless the Treo is as much PDA as Phone so at the upper end of the smartphone spectrum its more PDA like where the middle tier of the smartphone market is more phone like.
Vinea
In the real world, we use the phrases 'PDA', 'Smart Devices' and 'Smart Phones'.
Smart devices would be full-fledged touch-screen PDA's with phone functionality. The iPhone would fall in to the Smart Device catergory, along with PocketPC Phone Edition, Palm OS and Symbian.
Smartphone is mostly used to just refer to PocketPC Smartphone edition. These are the stripped-down, no touchs screen devices meant for one-handed operation.