Comments on: Palm OS Program Defeats Chess Grandmaster

Yet another lost opportunity for PalmOS to become entrenched in the business world.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

1. the size of the keys on the keyboard (they were universally derided as 'chiclets');

2. the screens were impractical - in fact they had screens which were bigger than what we normally get on palm-pilots (even today), but they were nevertheless very hard to read when trying to type; and

3. poor battery life.

Note that these problems were so bad that the total sales by HP, Hitachi and others together (despite a massive marketing effort by M$) were much less than what Palm achieved with the humble IIIx (at a time when it was being phased out). The whole HPC line was soon dropped in favour of the Palm form factor, because nobody was able to find an engineering fix to any of these problems.

Ryan, thanks for the link to the HIARCS site. That site has some links to articles which compare HIARCS with ChessGenius and other programs. Fascinating stuff. I'm amazed that HIARCS is even stronger than ChessGenius (which, on my TE, regularly beats me 8 games out of 10 - and I'm no slouch!).

For that matter, th euser interface could been performed on a simple calculator display (input with calculator buttons too). How fast are programable calculators these days?

It shows that given enough clock you can accomplish the task at hand.

PalmOS running on a Linux kernel would only strengthen the case for doing this.

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Sean

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Note that these problems were so bad that the total sales by HP, Hitachi and others together (despite a massive marketing effort by M$) were much less than what Palm achieved with the humble IIIx (at a time when it was being phased out). The whole HPC line was soon dropped in favour of the Palm form factor, because nobody was able to find an engineering fix to any of these problems.

What you conveniently gloss over is the real reason those PPC models failed: THEY CAME WITH THE HORRIBLE WINDOWS OS. A Sharp Zaurus-sized PalmOS 5.2 PDA built with the quality of the CLIE UX50 + running Documents To Go, NetFront, SnapperMail, etc could easily replace laptops for many business users. (And reduce business support costs to almost nothing.) These PalmTops™ would pay for themselves within a year...

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

That's the problem; the program must come up with every move in 30 minutes and 10 seconds, and every move must be good enough to beat a grand master. The same app running at 1.4 Mhz would not make the cut.

In regards to the mini-laptop being discussed, yeah the UX50 came real close to the target and only needed a few adjustments (bigger screen and less blank plastic around it), but the price was the killer for me.

Strange, the only PPC models I know came with either AmigaOS or MacOS ;-)

Also, nobody remembers Window$ "microlaptop" but Psion was a success as long as it existed. Nevertheless, I personally want my PDA as compact as possible without any kind of keyboard. I don't consider typing the most efficient way of human computer interaction and, hopefully, other modalities will replace it sometime in the long future, .... eventually.

I agree - the UX50 was expensive, but in this case, you get what you pay for. The UX50 is easily the slickest PDA design yet prodoced and will probably become the most sought-after model in a couple years. I know quite a few people who bought backup UX50 last year when it was announced that Sony was retreating from the PalmOS market. And the model was as rugged as hell: in the past year I've dropped mine several times (including onto cement), fallen asleep on it with the screen unfolded and abused it in uother unspeakable ways, but it just keeps on running perfectly. A few dents, but the magnesium case still isn't even scratched! If only the screen was a little bigger...

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.