Re: Future of Dolphin



Hi Bill,

I have already been in contact with Panasonic and they are shipping me
2X Panasonic Wireless Display units for free! I get to use these
puppies for 9 months without paying a single dime. The Panasonic CF-08
can be dropped from a height of 1 meter and it still works. Titanium
casing and shock absorption/resistance. They are spill resistent to
liquids and are sealed to keep out dust and dirt. 10.4 inch color LCD
Screen with a resolution of 1024x768, 64mb Ram, up to 10 hours battery
life. Built in Wireless b/g capability along with WEP and other
enryption standards. Windows CE 5.0 running ARM based processor XScale
technology.

This is what my customers want regarding a mobile device and that is
what I will deliver. It would be perfect if I could develope in D6 and
select a platform other than x86 architecture. While cell fones and
PDAs are viable within their own markets, I don't see large groups of
customers screaming to use them for Industrial, Medical, Inventory or
Mobile Maintenace applications. For these types of applications,
customers want something that is more akin to a PC but gives them the
mobility to go to any location in order to conduct business.

Being tied to the traditional desktop will still be a viable solution
for users, but the mobile computing aspects of business demand other
options and capabilities. Unfortunately, OA isn't addressing these
issues even though they have tremendous experience with the WinTel
platform, Windows Kernel and Libraries. Win CE is a subset of these
libraries scaled down to minimal requirements for mobile
applications.

Blair ported Squeaks VM to Windows CE Casio Cassiopeia, HP320LX i.e.,
a chipset other thann x86, therefore OA has some knowledge of what the
requirements are to provide crosss platform capabilities to the
Dolphin community. However, I can't afford to wait and see what
happens... To paraphrase your statement, the horse is already dead and
on its way to the glue factory...

Have a look at the Panasonic CF-08; http://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_slates_panasonic_cf08.html.
I am drooling at the possibility of having a Smalltalk client running
on this and similar devices while conducting distributed transactions
via SOAP to applicable systems/servers. If the client is not going to
be Dolphin based, then it will be ported to either Squeak or
Visualworks as these Smalltalk dialects already have a VM under the
ARM instruction set using Win CE.

As stated by Alan Kay, "The best way to predict the future is to
invent it".

Happy Computing,

Pax

.

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