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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, March 11, 2002It appears that I have been confused about the distinction between "Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition" and "Windows Powered SmartPhone 2002" devices. Bluetooth will eat the Phone Edition's lunch, not the SmartPhone's, at least in the consumer space. Hopefully some of the good things from the Phone Edition will filter back to the standard Pocket PC. I sorely miss the "Jounal" function in Outlook, and the "Call Notes" feature from the Phone Edition seems to partially address that.
What does SmartPhone bring to the party? Devices sized comparably with "normal" compact cellular phones. Integration with Outlook. A pretty face. On the downside, being so compact means that data-entry will be just as bad as on a regular cellular phone.
That may be enough for the SmartPhone to be a success. Asian consumers go nuts over feature-rich phones at nearly any price. Europeans will likely dig the SmartPhone too, if the price isn't much over EUR200 with contract (the Brits and Swiss might go higher). In the US market, they would have to be under $100 with contract. Or have excellent product placement on "Friends" and "Ally McBeal".
Project MOB has officially begun. Mobile Offline Blogger, a Pocket PC program that will store blog entries in a database. When connectivity is available, the program will forward posts to the user's server using the Blogger API over XML-RPC. Most of the popular blogging systems support this API, including all of Userland's products. Later I will consider implementing product-specific APIs the provide richer features (the Blogger API is quite limited).
This is my first project using Embedded Visual Basic. It is essentially VBScript 3.0 with a Forms designer and many broken things. Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Compact Framework will make eVB and it's ilk obsolete, but I don't have either of those things just yet. Soon, I hope.
Networking support in eVB is terrible. Using the cradle for connectivity I am seeing throughput of around 0.75KB/s. With my WLAN card things crank up to slightly over 1KB/s. Pathetic.
Fortunately, blog entries tend to be no more than a couple of KB, and the data-entry limitations of most PDAs would further encourage short postings.
