I felt I should crosspost this big old whinge I had today on the SavaJe dev. forums for you all to muse over.
The history is this:
SavaJe make a lovely pure-java OS for iPaqs. Hurrah! The next release takes a year later - and then they say they won’t/can’t support iPaq any more, and they’re going to move to the next gen. smartphones instead. FFS! Some people with their heads in the clouds and a mobile phone stuck up their arses cheer; and everyone else actually trying to get some kind of direction going with their development targets lambasts them heavily on their own forums.
Here’s the whinge I posted:
I feel I must chime in about this discussion finally and stop biting my nails in frustration. I personally hate mobile phones, and the fancier they are, the more I hate them, for being pointless. I use a phone to talk to people, not to play games on, or manage email, or other such rubbish. All I need is to talk. That’s it. Talk. Txt msging is an amusing gimmick but the novelty has worn off, because when time is money, talking gets you where you want to be, immediately. I personally hate the iPaq. I’m programming an iPaq right now to be a barcode reader with a Symbol sled, using NSIcom’s CrEme VM. Slick, not too slow, not particularly stable. And of course there’s drivers for the Symbol barcoder for WinCE - this proves to be a problem for Savaje, but I digress. I hate the iPaq, because it’s useless. Only a complete imbecile would spend £500 on a device to read emails on, surf the web, keep addresses in, and so on. I use a notepad to keep notes in, and a teeny little address book to keep addresses in. My Nokia keeps phone numbers. It lets me talk to people. Good. I have a PC at work and a PC at home, and I variously read emails and surf the web on both of them. Occasionally I’ll email myself from one to the other. So the iPaq is pointless. Fun, but pointless. I didn’t pay for it, thank God. I’d rather have spent my £500 on another desktop or even a second hand Dell laptop. Then I’d have something useful for my money. Actually no - I have discovered a good use for it - it’s got some fantastic games on it. Try Rocket Elite. Or Hovver Bovver. If only kids could afford iPaqs. But they can’t, so they can have a Game Boy Advance instead. It has occurred to me that I would only want one of these devices in my pocket, and the only useful one is the phone. It also cost about a tenth as much. It also occurred to me, that if the iPaq had a phone built in to it, that it would be the one that I want in my pocket. But it would still be a novelty toy, and still twice as expensive as I’d be prepared to pay for what amounts to gluing a Gameboy advance to the back of a Nokia and carrying around a little notepad with a pencil in my pocket. If you stuck wireless ethernet, GPS, and a camera in the thing and it was still £500, I’d buy it. But as it is, I don’t want a smart phone that runs Swing applications on it. I want a cheap phone that stores phone numbers and lets me talk. Or I want a PDA that’s useful, by virtue of being a phone too, and being able to play games on it, that doesn’t cost more than a PC. If it ran SavaJe on it instead of WinCE3.0 I’d be much happier, because I’m a Java programmer, and I like writing little things to run on devices. Now there’s 2p of wisdom. May the next generation of smartphones collapse in the stench of a thousand fleeing venture capitalists, because I, late-twentysomething- rich-nerd-programmer-boy-gizmo-marketing-man’s-wet-dream, don’t even want one.
Cas 