Another project by an enterprising individual - name of Seth. It seems that he has done much preparatory work and his time scale is on the distant side of realistic.

5” Screen, 3G cell phone, games controls, 3Mp camera incl flash, choice of models both with and without keyboard, much much more read it all here
http://www.pocketables.net/2009/03/o...vice.html#more

The only real blot is the ”Complete full Windows version” intent. I would hope that in 2103 Linux will finally be the de facto os but then I fully expected that to be the case 4 years ago too.

Great concept though, or has Nokia already thought of it first? Probably not the games capability part.

2013 is that the pandora release schedule too ;-)

oh, can the humor. unless the case maker gets a fire or something, first batch should be out this year.

as for this new project. im not sure i like the "proprietary os" bit...

Exactly, I spend too long on this and other like minded forums and so it comes as surprise to find that so many people just don't get the need for non-proprietary software..

Though to his credit he is open to suggestions and maybe this is one that should be mooted.

I won't be the one though, I am just not articulate enough to present the case convincingly.

well, it seems that it will be a x86 mid with gamepads grafted on, so getting some kind of linux running should not be that hard, if the product ever sees the light of day...

still, it would have been nicer if they took a chat with the pandora people and got some kind of cooperation on the software side of things...

if a simple recompile would be enough to make a version for both, i would call it a win/win...

Same here. I'm just _done_ with proprietary operating systems. They are constantly in the way and there's no real way to get things fixed. I have enough of problems with the few proprietary bits in our NITs as it is.

And, remember, it was Microsoft that started the whole completely-closed-never-look-at-it concept. Before that, most systems actually came with source code, strange as it sounds to those who grew up in the Gates paradigm years.

thats because most software back then was written by either the hardware companies or the colleges or universities using the hardware. it was seen as having no value on its own.

hell, i think bill gates has the first recorded rant against "pirates" in his "letter to the hobbyists"...

It wasn't that it was seen as having no value of its own, it was seen as a value-added feature for the hardware. If you had a Digital Equipment VAX, for example, you got VMS source code on microfiche. That made it easy to write drivers and the like. Another minicomputer vendor provided full OS source code listings as well as source code on a set of floppy disks. With that source available I wrote add-ons to the OS, for a project my company worked on, the result was that the minicomputer vendor was later able to sell a bunch of computers to an international customer, for several years.

Ah, yeah, the "letter to the hobbyists".. he came out as quite a snotty little bastard in that letter. Mind, I work with proprietary software for a living, so it's not that I'm against proprietary software at all. But there are good ways, and bad ways.

i suspect whats at odds are the ease of copying that digital storage provides, and that the users see every day, and the concept of shrink wrapped software (especially these days when one either have, or know someone that have, a connection that can allow one do download several gigs of data in a matter of hours or less).

the microsoft way made sense when distribution meant sneaker-net or similar (who was it that said something about the bandwidth of a beetle stuffed with tapes?), but its end is fortold by the net, just like similar ways for media.

the only way they can reverse that would be to put the os and software back on solid chips, but as console roms show, not even thats perfect.