Comments on: Palm OS Liscensed to China's Legend

Not as good as it sounds! The PDA markets shrinks rapidly this year in China.It's already too late!!!

> The PDA markets shrinks rapidly this year in China.

So a market growth rate of 52% for next year is bad?

Actually, Legend make PPC too.

If you look at what companies make PPCs, you'll realize that there are several Japanese language Pocket PCs on the market. Chinese language PPCs are numerous as well.

PPCs available to the Japanese and Chinese market:

Toshiba Genio-e
Toshiba Pocket PC e570
NEC Mobile Pro
dopod 686
MiTAC 528
Compaq iPaq Pocket PC H3870/H3835
Compaq iPAQ H3970
Acer n20
Acer n20w
xda
MyPal A600 (Asus)
ViewSonic Pocket PC V35
Eten InfoTouch P600
Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket LOOX
Legend XP100

None of these are English-only.

Actually, the link you had up there doesn't really give more info on the Chinese PDA you were talking about. Rather, that link points to a page about an event (some kind of conference) PalmSource will be holding (or is holding) in China.

This even will mainly touch on:
- Helping Chinese developers understand PalmSource's vision
- Giving Chinese developers more info on what the new OS can do (e.g. wireless, market competitiveness)
- Overview on the development tools

People such as David Nagel, Steve Sakoman, and Michael Mace will give speeches.

Also, a page is given for interested parties to register for this event.

Here is a photo.

http://www.legend.com.cn/news/detail.asp?id=2313

The device is called Palm168

that picture definitely looks sweet.
M5XX form factor, and a fully bright screen.
Where has PIC been the last 2 months? Its like theres no news anymore, and PIC is dead.

"Now thats just PRIME!"

And virtual grafitti by the look of it. Nice. Now all I need to do is learn Chinese, and import one!


FBN

Well... Legend is one of the most famous PC brands in Mainland China (and gradually the greater China region too)... The impact of having them to make Palm OS device is similiar to having Dell to make PPC.

Also the Yen is the official Japanese currency... it's the Yuan they use in PRC... :)

Wassup?

Legend is 30% of the PDA market in China. According to Legend Vice President - half of those will be Palm OS by the end of 2003. BTW - China doesn't use YEN - that's Japan.

Sorry about the Yen mistake. I knew that!

PalmSource is having a kickass week - anybody know if/how this has affected shar value?

And how about a 5.03 PalmOS?

Thanks for posting on PIC and staying in touch with the community Mike. Just one concern - the Legend device has 240*320 res - does this use the Handera API??? 240*320 is less then ideal as far as compatibility with existing software/graphics is concerned. If this is correct, then i hope they at least use the Handera API - though its tough enough to find support for this standard in software today. It would have been much better if they used OS5 hi-res (320x320 - or w virtual graffiti - 320x480)API - i believe there are now several devices that run on OS 4x but use the OS 5 hi-res API (Tungsten W, ACER).

> It would have been much better if they used OS5 hi-res

I would assume that it does use OS 5 hi-res APIs.

If you look at the High Density API introduced in Palm OS 5 (and available on Palm OS 4.x with the Acer s50/s60 and Palm Tungsten W), it is designed to also support the 240x320 screen. Specifically, look in the Window.h header for the value kCoordinatesOneAndAHalf, which is used to specify scaling by 1.5x. Current tools (PilRC & Constructor) can't specify bitmap families using this format, but I expect them to be updated in the near future once these devices are available.

I think it is likely that Legend will use this API along with an extension to support a virtual graffiti area, but I could be wrong.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com

I wonder whether this means that PalmSource is actually going to document the language API's for those developers who are trying to create multi-lingual aware applications.

I couldn't find a single piece of information on the PalmOS site as to the Chinese font encoding used by the Acer (big5 or gbxxxx?). The CJK/OS author also provides zero programming documentation. Although Shift-JIS was mentioned as a possible Kanji encoding, there were no examples. And there's even less information on the input methods. So now there is going to be another mystery OS (presumably supporting Big-5 encodings?), with the Palm name, but no documentation?

>>Specifically, look in the Window.h header for the value kCoordinatesOneAndAHalf, which is used to specify scaling by 1.5x. Current tools (PilRC & Constructor) can't specify bitmap families using this format, but I expect them to be updated in the near future once these devices are available.

Thanks for the tip Ben. Still - this is a pain. I don't need the hassle of writting YET MORE CODE to support something that isn't supported by Constructor. In fact - this is becoming a serious pain in the ass. I have have had a hell of a time making my code support pre-OS 5 (2bit,greyscale,color at 160x160 ), AND OS 5 API(16bit color at 320x320 ) AND with Sony. Finally a new version of Codewarrior is upon us and there is already a damned 'new' mode to deal with that isn't supported. crap. I just make database type apps - nice ones w/icons mind you. I am currently having trouble getting a custom hi-res font to work in OS 5 (to match the low-res version i have) - it seems that adding intelligence to my code to deal with different graphics capabilities of Palm OS devices is becoming a HUGE amount of overhead these days.

Well, the cool thing about CodeWarrior for Palm OS V9 is that we support directly using PilRC, so as soon as someone updated PilRC to support this 1.5x density, it will work fine with the CW toolset. I might just do the update in the Metrowerks build of PilRC once V9 is released. We still support Constructor, even though PilRC-format resource are encouraged in the V9 toolset.

I think that Constructor should be updated in a timely fashion by PalmSource to handle this as well as handling Chinese text input. Remember that Constructor and the Palm OS SDK are developed independently of the CodeWarrior tools, but PalmSource and Metrowerks do cooperate to make sure that they will work together.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com

Yes, but it is the hardware producers that are excited in this case.

there do exist cases of pirated hardware as well.... wasnt it recently that some bunch of ppl tried to steal plans of processors of intel...