Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Dan on April 02, 2003, 12:39:28 AM
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"Its a nice concept, but I.. I don't find palm-top computers
particularily interesting, personally, but you know, thats..."
Why ????!!!!
It would really make those Windowsconsumers shut up:
Yes, of course i can run exactly the same apps on the same OS at my handheld!
That would be the ultimate way to show of AmigaOS flexiblity and effectiveness.
They don´t need the money to license a handwriting recognition program, just build a Psion series 5 like device but with a flippable lid so it can be used in a Palmmode for reading/viewing.
And put some joypad buttons on there for games.
I mean even the biggest selling handhelds is
1)Phones
2)Gameboys
3)Musicplayers (mp3,MD,mp3enabled palmtops)
What could be provided by an Amiga handheld in order of importance:
1) Games (old and new, through UAE we already have more good games than Gameboy)
2) mp3player
3)calender
4)textviewer/ebook
5)picviewer
6)mail
7)movieplayer
"MicroATX AmigaONE, which is already in design. Now clearly this is aimed mainly at the server side"
"server farm of 10,000 servers"
"the A1SE Lite" "a module which will go into kiosk systems, set top boxes, things like
video surveylance systems. "
[color=0000FF]Naah, think BIG think SMALL![/color]
Besides then the DE crap really would get ported to an Amiga.
An Amiga in every living room is a smaller market than an amiga in everyones pocket.
Then if the Amiga gamemarket took of on the handheld, the Amiga would once again be a name in the gameindustry.
That would mean that they would consider doing games for the Amiga DVD64 when it´s launched, maybe it wouldn´t beat the PS3 but it would wipe the floor with the Xbox and Gamecube.
Anyway, everybody always wanted portable amigas.
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An Amiga based PDA in the near future would be a bad idea. The market
for any Amiga based system needs to be established first.
As for games and movies, it would be more a novelty geek toy and
too small a niche for our market.
A better starting point would be an Amiga PDA with spreadsheet,
database, organiser etc aimed at the business market.
I have recently been working for a food hygeine inspection business, a
few months ago they spent around £15,000 equiping their field workers
with Compaq Ipac's. Eyetech would do well to get these kind of
contracts.
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Dan wrote:
(...)
Yes, of course i can run exactly the same apps on the same OS at my handheld!
That would be the ultimate way to show of AmigaOS flexiblity and effectiveness.
(...)
Anyway, everybody always wanted portable amigas.
Wow. Have you ever used a Palmtop ? Do you realize the order of magnitude by witch a PalmTop OS is different from a desktop one ? Most of all, do you want AmigaINC to make the same mistake sa Microsoft did with WindowsCE ?
I did dream about a PalmTop Amiga. then I bought a Palm5000, and realized it was about that !
pX
PS - BTW, has anybody used a recent OS5 Palm with Spitfire or APilot ? Like, say a Tungsten-t (http://www.palm.com/products/handhelds/tungsten-t/specs.html) (Boy do I want one of those...) :crazy:
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MorphOS is everything you're describeing that you want... why not give it a try???... so far Genesi/BPlan havent lied about release dates/etc... the Eclipsis looks like it might be just what you want... the psylent was already demo'd ... the Pegasos1 is done... the Pegasos 2 is on the way... MOS is shipping... they have plans to give it away for free to Phase5 cards...
its cool man... just check it out... they are not the enemy... their fellow amigans who got sick of the BS and made their own OS.
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An Amiga based PDA in the near future would be a bad idea.
A better starting point would be an Amiga PDA
a bit contradictory are we?
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I understood from Alans comment is that he personally doesn't find them interesting as a hardware base from a productivety POV.
I think that is true. Watching a mm presentation or doing work is not what people buy a PDA for.
At the moment a PDA is mainly for entering data and accessing it again.
And games have been and will be on every hardware platform.
I think that the Amiga would best serve PDAs through the AmigaDE. AmigaOS would serve only as a 'Kickstart' type of system.
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Am partly disagree, that an Amiga (like/based/etc.) palm is a bad thing. Stuffing an A500 category machine into a palm size today is not that impossible task as it may seem.
Remember it had 512K memory (1Mb with expansion), while my Palm505 has 8Mb. (And 510 16Mb, and it just increases) It had a much slower CPU than which is in my Palm505 too, and the dragonball is pretty much compatible. Custom chips may be problematic, but the idea of having programs and an OS with the footprint of A500 programs and OS3.1 in a palm sound pretty realistic, methinks. I'd definitely buy one.
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http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm (http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm)
IBM PowerPC 405 based PDA. Both MorphOS and AmigaOS4 should be able to run on this device, instead of linux.
*yawn*
(that MCC term is still kicking around too! eeks!)
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Yes, having the PPC OS-es on a palm has a more viable future, yet ATM the 32Mb RAM it has is not that much. (Considering the footprint of PPC programs (mnemonics occupy larger space), and the extra ram needed for legacy 68K support (JIT buffer, etc.))
Both a 68K or a PPC based handheld can be a good solution ATM, while I agree that the PPC one has better future.
What is the performance of the PowerPC 405LP compared to a 603e or a G3?
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Motorola produce a 66mhz 68020 dragonball mobile processor, boxer produced a one chip amiga chipset, why wasn't a mobile classic ever produced from these parts?
Even today it would be far more powerfull than my psion, or winCE devices. Lightwave on the move anyone? or alienbreed3d2? I think amiga should have produced a PDA/mini note (with OS3's low foot print in terms of processor and memory requirements, it would be ideal) rather than the amiga anywhere they are touting at the moment. It would have been one last shout from the classic before OS4. Besides, i'm sick of lugging a heavy laptop around just so I can emulate my Amiga ;)
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Absolutely, but bear in mind these things:
a) the HEAT off that CPU would be significant.
b) have you seen the size of those Altera Flex PLDs that Mick Tinker used ?
the thing would end up as a laptop anyway -
especially considering the Battery that would be required.
how about a 5" kneetop ? ( :-P half a lap ! )
if a slimline 2.5"HDD, a 4" TFT screen and a low profile keyboard could be crammed in, all you would then need is a USB port (or two) and an external monitor connection. plus a DC connector to a recharger. - the form factor I'm thinking is like those sony Vaio laptops built around the Crusoe. (8.95" wide-aspect XGA screen ? 1280-600)
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I dont think there that much use myself more a geeky toy you never use i hava a psion series 5mx i hardly use so i agree with him. :-)
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So what? The pope supposedly doesn't like porno either, does that mean I have to agree? Err, I didn't say that out loud, did I? :-)
Look, Alan is (like everyone else) entitled to an opinion. The question was "what do you think about..." and the answer was "well, personally, I...". Calm down.
I seriously DO NOT SEE how you can ARGUE with PERSONAL opinion. That's just TOTALLY WRONG...
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@xaccrocheur
Wow. Have you ever used a Palmtop ? Do you realize the order of magnitude by witch a PalmTop OS is different from a desktop one ? Most of all, do you want AmigaINC to make the same mistake sa Microsoft did with WindowsCE ?
I did dream about a PalmTop Amiga. then I bought a Palm5000, and realized it was about that !
pX
Not Palm or WinCE, but i use my Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 everyday :roll: and it´s nothing like an desktop OS, can you say "objectsoup" :-) . It can´t even use standard Flashcards because of it.
But what would the AmigaOS need to run as a PDA? It already is small memory footprint and instant-on, it´s just a matter of some save RAM and open documents to Flashstorage module, even Windows has that. Although I wouldn´t use it, just save your work and turn it off as always with Amigas :-P
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@Valan
I understood from Alans comment is that he personally doesn't find them interesting as a hardware base from a productivety POV.
I think that is true. Watching a mm presentation or doing work is not what people buy a PDA for.
At the moment a PDA is mainly for entering data and accessing it again.
And games have been and will be on every hardware platform.
And what is productivety?
Office,CAD,3D modeling, videoediting and coding is not what most people use their computers for.
Doing what i do most of my time in front of the computer,running games, paintprograms, surfing, e-mail and some textediting is perfectly doable on an PDA.
And i prefer to write with a pen instead of pressing keyboard buttons, my brain works much better with a pen. As they said in programmingclass:
"Write the design down on paper first"
I think that the Amiga would best serve PDAs through the AmigaDE. AmigaOS would serve only as a 'Kickstart' type of system.
I don´t care about DE it has nothing to do with Amiga they are just using the name, and you can´t really belive that they can compete with Sun Java???
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http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm
IBM PowerPC 405 based PDA. Both MorphOS and AmigaOS4 should be able to run on this device, instead of linux.
@Darth_X
I have seen that one before it was exactly was i was thinking about.:-D
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@Khephren
Motorola produce a 66mhz 68020 dragonball mobile processor, boxer produced a one chip amiga chipset, why wasn't a mobile classic ever produced from these parts?
Even today it would be far more powerfull than my psion, or winCE devices. Lightwave on the move anyone? or alienbreed3d2? I think amiga should have produced a PDA/mini note (with OS3's low foot print in terms of processor and memory requirements, it would be ideal) rather than the amiga anywhere they are touting at the moment. It would have been one last shout from the classic before OS4. Besides, i'm sick of lugging a heavy laptop around just so I can emulate my Amiga ;)
I don´t know about the Boxer chipset but in a interview with Petro Tyschtschenko back in October 96 in swedish magazine AmigaInfo he said that they had combined Paula, Alice och Lisa on one chip!!!
Why was this never used????!!! :-? :madashell:
Today it wouldn´t be of much use in a PDA(most have 16bit screens today), but in an game device it would still be useful( hardware sprites).
Those Sony PalmOS devices sounds pretty intressting with Dragonball 66Mhz, 16MB Ram and mp3-playback.
I still don´t like the small screen, 320x480 16bit on the most advanced model, i prefer 640x256 Highres pal noninterlace.
I know 480x320 as I use my Newton in landscape mode most of the time,it´s not enough for comfortable text viewing.
And 320x240 isn´t that a C64 mode?? Anyway it´s not enough for UAE, so just forget it.
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Damn some of you people are stupid.
If the choice was to release a new product which is exclusively portable or not portable, any lucid person would choose the former!
Gawd damn maybe instead of releasing a somewhat portable Macintosh in 1984 you would argue that Apple should have released a larger, more cumbersome model first! WTF?!
:roll:
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MorphOS is everything you're describeing that you want... why not give it a try???... so far Genesi/BPlan havent lied about release dates/etc... the Eclipsis looks like it might be just what you want... the psylent was already demo'd ... the Pegasos1 is done... the Pegasos 2 is on the way... MOS is shipping... they have plans to give it away for free to Phase5 cards...
Yeah why didn´t i get a A4000 with an CyberstormPPC when it was available and i had the money,me is STUPID, STUPID, STUPID
the Eclipsis looks like it might be just what you want...
To much junk making it to expensive, nobody needs cameras in their pdas and gsmmodules should be optional extra, and where is the specs?
What i want is either of these
A)AmigaOS 4.0/MorphOS/AROS running pda with PowerPC CPU, Compact Flash slots for storage and network, ,USB, serial port, keyboard, gamepad buttons, 640x256 pressure sensetive screen that flips around to the back tobe used as a notepad.
B) WB3.9/AROS pdawith 68k cpu and the same specs above but maybe without USB preferable with an all AGAcustom chips integrated into one chip and working as an A1200 compatible. Wow, that would have video out too.
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I don´t care about DE it has nothing to do with Amiga they are just using the name, and you can´t really belive that they can compete with Sun Java???
I recall, Sun’s Java VM is limited to Java language... Tao’s VP technology is not limited to one programming language.
Edit: removed the “not” from the first sentence.
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Look, Alan is (like everyone else) entitled to an opinion. The question was "what do you think about..." and the answer was "well, personally, I...". Calm down.
Ok, if it was his personal opinion.
It don´t neccesarily have to be Eyetech making it
Maybe someone else can make an AmigaOS pda
It´s to forget that the Amiga isn´t just one company these days. It was much easier back in the Commodore era, only one company to complain about.
Anyway the A1G3Lite is good news if it ever will be made, say DIY-portable everyone.
Anyway the Amiga needs to find a niche to use to get back into the mind of people, an obscure and expensive desktop computer won´t do it. In the old days Atari had MIDImusic, Apple had DTP, MS DOS PCs had spreedsheets(Excel) and Amiga had video and computer gaming, later we took the multimedia market too.
Nowadays PC still has the officemarket, Apple has the DTP and video market. The music and mutlimedia market is split between them. Palm has the pda market, Symbian has the mobilephones, Sun/IBM/Linux has the servers and Sony PS2 has the gaming. Now were would the Amiga reenterthe computer market??
Well obviously in the video and multimedia market but that is small markets that don´t sell many units. If Amiga want to become on equal level to the Macs again we need something more and beating the Playstation out of nowhere seems to be impossible. But the pda market isn´t closed for a new player yet as seen by the linux pdas.
How did eyetech got into the amiga it was because of multimedia right???
So I´m sure that they will target that but we need video and pdas too and maybe even a gamemachine or STB
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The PDA market still has room, and I reckon an Amiga would outperform a palm running on a dragonball. Mick tinkers design might have caused a lot of heat disipation- but it was fabbed at a very large size. Reduce that to modern size and the disipation would be minimal. While most 'new' users would see it as a cool new PDA/subnote with thousands of excelent games and applications- we would see it for what it is, not a digital assistant, but a fully functional computer. Like the Psion wanted to be (god bless 'em, rest in peace my Revo). I would guess that alan has a lot of room in his house for computers, or never wants to move his computer from room to room, or doesn't commute (like I and many others do). Laptop sales accounted for over a quarter of all PC sales, and that isn't counting PDA's. It's a market you can ignore personally, but as a business decision? you would be a fool to do so I think. Rather than punting AmigaDE (which hasn't much to do with the Amiga in my opinion) they should have tried to sell a small, compact and powerfull OS, Amiga OS.
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Well... AROS does boot on the Palm devices (they use a 68K compatible CPU, you see).
When that port become more mature you could get a cheap Palm second hand and play with AROS on the move.
It is also certainly possible (desirable) to port AROS to the PocketPC PDAs, something that I have looked at myself.
One key point is that a Desktop OS does not transpose well to a handheld device... Fortunatelly AROS has been designed to allow the GUI to be modified for Embeded systems.
P.S. The PPC cpu is not a good choice for handhelds, I would put my money on the StrongARM. :-)
And... The Amiga Chipset wouldn't make much sense on a hand held device. All you need is a nice fast blitter chip and a 16bit 44.1Khz DAC (so you can listen to your MP3s/OGGs). All the other stuff the Amiga chips provided can now be done much better with a nice fast blitter on a chunky (Hi-Colour/Tru-Colour display).
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@Dan:
Excactly.
If people here thinks it's so horrible that Alan doesn't like PDA's, then FOR CRYING OUT LOUD MAKE IT YOURSELF!!!
Business is business, and you don't just throw money into something you don't believe in. Unless you've got a pretty bad reputation for believing in the wrong things ;-)
However, I think the point here is that Alan has a roadmap for what he wants to do with the AmigaOne, and he has been given some help from MAI and IBM (it's obviously MUCH easier working together with those who make the individual parts in your product than working against them (like (allegedly) some others do...) on how they envision the desktop ppc platform roadmap, and he believes he can pull this off. Then someone comes along and asks what he thinks about palmtop amigas, and he says he personally doesn't care much for them. The whole point behind this should be that Eyetech doesn't have a monopoly on the name "Amiga", Amiga Inc will give you a license if you agree to their terms.
Hmm, kinda lost my track here. What was I talking about? :-)
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I've lost track too :) I think Alan has stuck his neck out enough already. If I had any capital i'd design a portable Amiga, probably a little bit smaller than a Psion Netbook. Fifty pence won't cut it however.
Back to bloodlines ideas about strongarm/fastblitters: that would be great, but would it run all your Amiga apps and games? if it didn't it would be kind of pointless. Also no modern PDA supports 640x512 or 640x480 to my knowledge, which would at least be required to get a lot of amiga apps running. Unless you could get Aros running on a netbook/series7. Where does aros stand legally anyway? I love the idea of it, but can't believe it is legal.
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Khephren wrote:
I've lost track too :) I think Alan has stuck his neck out enough already. If I had any capital i'd design a portable Amiga, probably a little bit smaller than a Psion Netbook. Fifty pence won't cut it however.
Back to bloodlines ideas about strongarm/fastblitters: that would be great, but would it run all your Amiga apps and games? if it didn't it would be kind of pointless. Also no modern PDA supports 640x512 or 640x480 to my knowledge, which would at least be required to get a lot of amiga apps running. Unless you could get Aros running on a netbook/series7. Where does aros stand legally anyway? I love the idea of it, but can't believe it is legal.
Concidering that the AROS team have written AROS from scratch (no AmigaOS source code has been studied or used) and taken great care not to use any trademarked names, AROS is perfectly legal.
It certainly is not ilegal to make something which is "compatible" with another thing.
Well binary compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1 would be possible on AROS on the Palm since it uses a 68K compatible CPU. :-)
But other than that, any new CPU will require programs to be recompiled (not really a problem with C programs) . And this is the crux of the matter with AROS (and indeed AOS4 and MOS since they do not run on 68k cpus, although they have emulation).
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Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm (http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm) a fake?
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ksk wrote:
Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm (http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm) a fake?
It's a BIT hard to say based on _1_ short sentence, innit? ;-)
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AmigaOS (7:06am EST Thu Apr 03 2003)
The next version of AmigaOS (4.0) is already running on PPC G3 and G4s, and Amiga has substantial experience in the phone and PDA markets with its Amiga Anywhere product line. - by fleecy moss
Thats really creepy. Olegil, did you steal his name and psot that :-P .
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Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm a fake?
Probably
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Dan wrote:
Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm a fake?
Probably
Still, it's just one sentence long, so hard to to say. It's also VERY hard to see why anyone would fake that. Usually, we see people imporsonating to make the other person look bad, but in this case it's a pretty much neutral statement so I don't think anyone actually CARES if it's faker or not. If it's fake, what does it matter?
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Also no modern PDA supports 640x512 or 640x480 to my knowledge, which would at least be required to get a lot of amiga apps running.
No we just need 640x256 (Pal Highres noninterlaced) which doesn´t exists either.
But there are some devices with 640x240 screens like the HP jornada and the psion netpad, actually psion netpad is the formfactor i want but it lacks some hardware.
It´s to bad the highest res on the palm is the Sony 480x320 and the next set of palm will be arm7 based( not 68k compatible).
Anyway i don´t think anyone will make pdas with screens that are satisfactory to me, might just aswell do one myself.
DIY is the way!
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Quote:
I don´t care about DE it has nothing to do with Amiga they are just using the name, and you can´t really belive that they can compete with Sun Java???
I recall, Sun’s Java VM is limited to Java language... Tao’s VP technology is not limited to one programming language.
Edit: removed the “not” from the first sentence.
Actually you was right the first time, there are other languages for Java and you could build an compiler that compiles to Java code and thats according to a my teacher in computer science when was I taking the initial computer science course at uni.