Lucky Green[SMTP:shamrock@cypherpunks.to]

Ryan wrote:

...

"Everyone" has palm pilots already. WinCE-based PocketPCs haven't made much of a dent in the marketplace. There is also a very large developer community for palm apps, and they're widely deployed in corporations.

I am not sure that the existance of a large developer community has much bearing on the suitability of Palm as an encrypting phone platform. As for the hardware, it simply is underpowered. You can spend man-months trying to fight the current underpowered Palm platform or you can use the sufficiently-resourced PowerPC platform. Since I don't believe that there is a requirement for the feature to operate on a device already in the user's possession, I know what my choice would be. YMMV.

It's a fact that there is a much larger developer community for the Palm than for the Ipaq, however, I suspect that this is a temporary phenomenon. MS is giving away it's development environment for free, and as pointed out, there is are several Linux ports. The higher cost of PocketPC devices can be balanced against their higher power. Let's remember that for a specific app, we don't actually *need* more than one programmer.

...

If you're assuming users will buy a dedicated device *and* put linux on it, that's reasonable (or sell pre-packaged systems). Otherwise, you also need to develop for WinCE on the PocketPC.

The OS is really of secondary or tertiary concern here. The more important question is which (if any) handheld hardware supports full-duplex audio. Do we know for fact that the lack of full duplex audio support on the VoIP handheld demo is due to lack of support in the HW or could it be a lack of support in the WinCE OS?

I could care less if I have to program under WINCE or Linux; some OSs require a bit more learning before I'm productive, but any programmer who can't pick up another environment quickly isn't worth his salt. Doing it under WINCE (or both Linux and WINCE) has the advantage that the app develops a user base much more quickly. As for hardware limitations; I havent verified this independently, but this is from the Stanford project cited earlier:

"An investigation of the audio capture and playback capabilities of the Compaq iPAQ revealed that the speaker and microphone on the PDA are the same hardware device, and cannot both be in use at the same time. As a result, the system had to be engineered such that only one of audio playback and audio capture happens at any one time."

--Lucky

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