I choose to regard the 770 as a wireless handheld x terminal - a touchscreen display that is network-driven. For me, the 770's 'desktop' is not so much a view of what is contained within the 770 and available to the user but also a view of what is available anywhere on the wide area network.

I talked yesterday with someone who recently sat in his home with his wife & kids while he was putting four new items on the menu in the 80 restaurants operated by the company he works for, all across Canada, while the people in the restaurants were using their systems. He did not use a computer, by the way, he only used a touchscreen display that was connected to the network! He makes use of openVPN (along with my pos) to continuously connect to all of those locations, bypassing the traffic of the world wide web. He manages all the IT work for his company all by himself, part time. Nobody at any restaurant organization has ever even dreamed of creating the kind of efficiency and control he has achieved. Even the people running the organization he works for don't really comprehend what has been done. I've visited restaurant companies that have a staff of 12, 15 or more as they attempt something similar, and fail. I know of a restaurant organization not too much bigger that has spent over $20 million attempting this and has failed. I could tell you stories.

In the 22 years since X first was created, nobody has ever built a handheld wireless touchscreen device before that ran X. Now that Nokia's done it the genie is out of the bottle. Not even Nokia understands what they've made possible, yet. More apps tomorrow and, hopefully, pos.

Meanwhile, anyone who has ever added an application to the KDE or Gnome panels, or to a windows/apple desktop would now be thinking how to add an icon to the 770's display that can contain the ssh command to open a display to any remote X client application. As soon as someone does that then the 770 has a network-driven GUI, not just a device GUI, and the number of icons you can have in the GUI, the variety of client apps & storage that you can access with your 770 GUI is virtually unlimited - it's bigger than the world wide web because it includes the entire Internet, not just the www.

One more thing - any app on that box you open a window to is running on FreeBSD 6.0. The eyes would look exactly the same if the box were running any Linux distro, or any other OS that X abstracts, so you wouldn't know or have to care because X means that not only is the remote hardware irrelevant, but so is the remote OS. And if the box got too busy instead of building a server farm we would just migrate the client application to a cluster (or grid) and move the storage to the network.