[SATLUG] [OT]Sony personal communicator

[Brad Knowles]

On 10/29/07, Alex Bartonek wrote:

>  I'm still yawning...  yea your iphone can do this n
>  that etc.. I had a PPC-6700 phone..loved it, could do
>  C programming, ssh w/pocketputty, vnc (supposedly they
>  had it?), browse the web, watch mpeg/avi/other movies
>  and a whole bunch of other nerdy crap ..but it got to
>  the point to where if I had to do some typing I would
>  need a much bigger keyboard to get my work done
>  quicker and those screens are just too small for me.

There is no Windows Mobile phone that has ever existed, or could ever 
possibly exist in the future, which could possibly compare to the 
iPhone.  Don't trot out an excuse like:

	Yeah, I had a handheld device twenty years ago that actually
	had a real physical keyboard with real keys and all, and
	therefore I'm qualified to judge whether or not your iPhone
	should be allowed to exist or not.

That would be like saying that you're qualified to judge whether or 
not electric shavers or safety razors with more than one blade should 
be allowed to exist, based on your own personal experience in the 
previous century with a straight razor, a cup of mix-it-yourself 
shaving foam, and a strop.


The thing that makes the iPhone revolutionary is that they throw away 
a lot of the old paradigms, and they take a fresh look at how a 
mobile device can actually be useful to someone with just a touch 
screen interface and one single physical button on the front.

Forget all that nice third-party software, what really makes the 
iPhone is the OS and the interface that they've developed, which is 
unlike anything that has ever come before.  You could put all that 
same software on a Windows Mobile device, and you might as well be 
putting lipstick and perfume on a pig, because the resulting outcome 
would be about the same.

>  Its nice for what it is, a phone that has some extra
>  features for the geek in you.  I just got tired of it
>  and sold it, just like I would if I had a iphone.

Have you ever heard of the TV show "Eureka"?  Well, the iPhone is the 
communications device they wish that they had conceived of, because 
it's already way better than anything they did come up with.  They've 
got lots of other cool gadgets they've come up with, but in the phone 
department they're still stuck in the last century.

>  Now if this was about openmoko & Neo1973 then yea, you
>  could say I'm "hating" because I havent bought it yet.

Do your homework on OpenMoko and the company behind the Neo 1973.


They're a bad Windows Mobile licensee who can't successfully compete 
against the likes of Samsung or HTC, so they're trying to wring some 
more money out of their platform by giving some token support to the 
OpenMoko project.  Any money they get is going back into their 
Windows Mobile efforts, and virtually nothing is being fed back into 
the Neo.

They're being left to twist in the wind on previous generation 
hardware, meanwhile the Trolltech folks have apparently killed the 
Greenphone, and made the critical mistake of supporting the OpenMoko 
project and Neo 1973 without fully understanding what's really going 
on.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>