Some people try to justify fat heavy UMPC's in their pocket (a little bigger than the n900) but sometimes its just easier to carry a thin citrix client to a virtual win7 desktop.

If you're willing to abdicate all control and ownership to the 3rd party, who may suddenly become unavailable.

The industry has had fits and starts trying to push people back to the world of dumb-terminals attached to a mainframe multiple times over the last two decades, with little to no success.

Frankly I don't trust them, and such bandwidth intensive workarounds to easily solved problems that present themselves due to being tied to an uncooperative and controlling vendor is idiotic at its core.

True. I have had experience of this with free virtual desktop hosting clients. Anyway, I would pay for the service if it was cheap enough and they asked to pay.

Don't get me wrong.
Solution you promoting here or SkFire is just respond for stupidity of tech situation on the market. And again, instead go with remote desktop and have exactly the same result, those solutions trying to convince wider market tat is something more sophisticated as remote desktop actually is. Building some framework on top of that, keep building up another one layer using heh.... dialect of java... gosh..

Even if someone prefer that computing power supposed to be on the sever side... fine. But again, this is not efficient solution. Cost all of us lose of network performance if will be adopt by market. And makes mobile web useless. Or network operators will charge us more for "SkyFire capable" internet... This is just not going in good direction IMHO.

Yeah, in fact I have quite a few UMPC's myself such as the UMID and Viliv 3G (in pic) but the difference in size between them and the new iphone is quite remarkable.

Most of the big RDP software titles don't stream sound so its not a full desktop experience.

And SkyFire or what you showing here is not either.

This technology make sense if you wont to stream Crisis and play on your mobile device. In terms of energy consumption, computing power needed etc. But streaming 50kb flash file or html text it's just crazy and will cost all of us. Because of infrastructure.

First of all we as consumers paying for infrastructure improvements in may different ways, if any company will invest to it is never just for fun but for profit. (Example: Vodafone definition of the word "unlimited" in UK)

Secondly current standard web experience is in danger.

Each individual thinking about himself. As long as you can enjoy this workaround is good for you and yes... it works.
The problem is those individuals are couple of millions already...

Thought I'd share this...

So I was talking to my manager, who happens to own an iPhone. As far as I know he doesn't any other Apple product, but he definitely has the same psychological problems that an Apple fanatic has.

I happen to be talking about how useful for my job it is to have the N900. Being able to SSH into our phone server and reload Asterisk, or trouble shoot the flash panel.

So inevitably he started talking about the iPhone 4.. and how 'innovative' it is.

I just said "the only thing I thought was kind of cool was the high resolution screen, but since it's capacitive, I wonder how accurate it'll be, I love my stylus, it's extremely useful on the higher resolution and more accurate than a finger tip."

So he then started replying by saying "why would I want to go back to a phone with a cord?" Wtf?

So I started to explain to him, on some websites, links can be rather tiny at higher res, and if the capacative screen isn't very accurate, you'd never be able to click on any of them, forcing you to zoom every time. But he kept with his argument, then saying that most websites he visits have a 'special iPhone version'. How screwed up is that? Seriously, why would you want a special iPhone version, when you can enjoy the FULL web? Flash? You know, the sort of things that are USEFUL?

So I just told him, "wow, so you really buy into the 'well if we say it's not useful, then it must not be!' Apple crap?" He just kept on saying why would he want to go back to a phone with a cord.

Truly, Steve Jobs has somehow mystified geeks into think he's the next Jim Jones. I wonder if Apple started to collapse, if he'd get them all to drink some Koolaid.

I swear, that man could sell a Word Processor without a Spell Checker.

Steve: Hey programmers, I've got a great idea for you! Let's put a full word processor on the iPad so that people can write on the go!

Programmers: But Steve, we've been working on the word processor since we released the first iPhone. It's almost done, but we don't have a spell checker, auto-indent, and a few other things.

Steve: That's ok, we'll just ignore that and tell our customers that it's better, because they will be able to write with the same crappy language they use in text messaging and it won't highlight everything in red! It's brilliant!

Programmers: Uhm, that's really a dumb idea Steve, we really should get this in there...

Steve: Bah, we'll just add it later, and say it's a new revolution in word processing! We can add it amongst our 100 new features, along with bookmarks and PDF reading....

slaapliedje

Verrek, een echte mongol

umm, there are capacitive Stylli you know...

It's not the stylus that makes resistive panels valuable, its that the granularity for detection is much, much finer than capacitive can achieve. Capacitive is highly sensitive, but can only detect relatively coarse regions of input (whereas the N900's screen is, if you need it, pixel-accurate.)