Re: The Future of mySTEP?

[Dr. Nikolaus Schaller]

Alex Perez <aperez@student.santarosa.edu> wrote in message 
news:<mailman.4087.1098218862.2017.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>...
> Dr. Nikolaus,
> 
> On 19 Oct 2004, Dr. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> 
> > Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> wrote in message 
> > news:<mailman.3836.1098113403.2017.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>...
> > > I like the sound of this, but it also must be said that implementing a 
> > > fully standards-compliant XML parser with good performance is not a 
> > 
> > I have now made a first speed test (but not a compare since I don't
> > have libxml2) on a Sharp Zaurus 400MHz ARM: needs approx. 4 seconds
> > (after read from disk) to parse and convert a 110kByte XML .plist file
> > with 4700 lines (and approx. 9000 tags) into a NSDictionary. So this
> > ends up in parse speed of less than 400us per tag.
> 
> This is somewhat unrelated but I am curious to find out your position 
> regardless...Sharp has recently (a few days ago) announced that it plans 
> to pull the Zaurus line from the USA market. See 
> http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5438.html for more details. The 

Yes, that is a shame - but I got the impression they have not sold
very much
of these devices. Originally it was meant as a ruggedized industrial
PDA at
a rather high price and not for consumer's use as a daily PDA. For
that it is
rather large and bulky (280g). And I remember they had been in a
partnership
with IBM but probably IBM did not find projects to use it.

> announcement says nothing of the European market. I'm just wondering what 

It is even worse - they stopped after the SL5500; the SL5600 and
SL6000 have
never been sold through Sharp.

But: there are companies in the US and EU that import from Japan and
handle FCC/CE
approvals to resell these devices. So, If you really want such a
device you can
purchase one - coming with a Japanese GUI. But this can be easily
reflashed to English.

> the future of mySTEP is in light of this most recent development.. It's a 
> shame Sharp has decided to yank these devices from the market, but hey, if 
> they don't sell, they don't sell... :( I've never used mySTEP but it looks 
> pretty cool from the shots I've seen of it.
> 
> Anyways, I was merely interseted in what your long-term plans are.

But Sharp did not pull out from the Japanese market at all.
The latest development is the announcement of the C3000 model which
will
come out Nov 10th in Japan. It is the first PDA with an integrated 4GB
harddisk...
This is plenty of capacity to put a full operating system and
application suite on it
and store still tons of e-mails, music files, ...!

So my plans are to move mySTEP to run on the newer C series Zaurus
models
(C860 and C3000) and work myself as one of these import companies
(http://www.handheld-linux.com) to provide both - mySTEP and Zaurus
devices.

And even more long term (needing much more backing investment money),
I think about having someone (Sharp?) build an optimized Linux PDA or
Smartphone that comes with mySTEP preinstalled... So, my dream is a
real
"MacPDA" or "MacPhone" :-) based on your great GNUstep work - and also
giving GNUstep back developments like NSXMLParser.

Best regards,
Nikolaus

http://www.dsitri.de/wiki.php?page=mySTEP