[SunRescue] we're all just spoiled (was: re: IPC)

[Hatle]

All,

As a "hanging on by my fingernails" Newton 2100 user, I've been sitting the
fence between Palm and the new Compaq Ipaq.

I like my Newton, but since the software pipeline has pretty well dried up,
I can see the handwriting on the wall (no pun intended). The chance of any
new application I might need being developed is slim, and I don't need to
learn how to program it <grin>.

I can do sync with Outlook with a 3rd party program I have, and the Internet
connectivity via PCMCIA is better than I've seen on any other PDA.

The StrongArm in there (160 Mhz?) is plenty fast- as good as the Palms or
Ipaq's I've tried as far as moving around within and between apps.

I'll probably be a new Ipaq user before too long. The platform seems more
versatile to me, though it's hard to argue with the market share of Palm.

I'm open to constructive harangues on why I should buy one or the other
<grin>

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Hebel [mailto:druaga at pmail.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 10:24 AM
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: RE: [SunRescue] we're all just spoiled (was: re: IPC)


>>CE is no better than 9x, and in many ways it's much worse.

I'll second that.  I've used "wince" on my PDA and I really hate it.

>>When comparing PDAs, don't forget that a typical CE machine has
>>a 200 MHz R4400 or equivalent. None of the ARM-based ones have
>>anything less than a StrongARM. All of the old SH3 machines
>>have long since been dropped because CE is just too slow on
>>a 60+ MHz 680x0 clone!

My Uniden PC-100 is a 75mhz MIPS and is "ok" for CE 2.0 but still bogs down
and locks up occasionally.  I wish there was an easy way for me to re-burn
the OS rom.  It's a MIPS chip so I bet I could port Linux MIPS to it.  That
would be really cool!

>>Palms, Psions, and the like are all using much slower CPUs with
>>a much more efficient OS.

Handspring seems to have made the best go of it so far IMHO.  They have a
fairly zippy box that runs anything Palm due to their licensing.  On top of
that they have the Handspring modules.  (*drool* want visor-phone *drool*)
They even seem to have a good battery life.

>>The other side of CE is that its reliability is even worse than 9x.
>>Microsoft's own example code contains workarounds for kernel race
>>conditions by using sleep() calls. The documentation doesn't see
>>anything wrong with this, but does note that it may be necessary
>>to increase the time of the sleep() on newer, faster machines!

Not to mention lockups, program incompatibilities between CPU types, bloated
memory requirements, etc...  I think that CE will hang around for another
few years if that and then be dumped by Microsoft.  Probably during the
breakup.

Just my $.02. ;-)

Mike Hebel

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