Alan dismissing the handhelds at AmiGBG

[Dan]

@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???

[Dan]

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

[Dan]

@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.

[strobe]

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:

[Dan]

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.

[Hammer]

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.

[Dan]

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

[Khephren]

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.

[bloodline]

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).

[olegil]

@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? :-)

[Khephren]

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.

[bloodline]

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).

[ksk]

Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm a fake?

[olegil]

ksk wrote:
Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm a fake?

It's a BIT hard to say based on _1_ short sentence, innit? ;-)

[jeffimix]

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  .

[Dan]

Is that Fleecy at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/bpd20030123018304.htm a fake?

Probably