A year ago today!!!!
Whoohooo! Here's one of my first posts online from a year ago today:
There's been an amazing amount of news in the past month or so about the handheld device market so I finally sat down to try to organize all these news-bits to figure out what's going on. Mobile phones are getting Smarter, PDAs are going wireless and hybrid "communicators" are just starting to hit the marketplace: With at least four different OS's vying for these devices, it looks like there will be a shake out soon. PalmOS, Microsoft Windows CE, SymbianOS and Linux all have a stake in the handheld OS future and even Sun's Java looks like it could be a player too. Anyone looking at this market could be reminded of the early days of the PC before MS-DOS, especially since it seems that everyone seems to have "standardized" on the ARM processor and the wireless standards Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 as well as GSM/CDMA/GPRS/etc. Now it's up to the OS to make these things useful. But which is going to survive?
Just recently, we've seen that Nokia has picked off the PDA top spot in Europe in Q3/2001 with it's Symbian OS based 9210 PDA/mobile phone and is set to launch the "the brick" in the U.S. by summer. Symbian seems to have a lock on the "smartphone" market since Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Panasonic, and soon maybe DoCoMo all own a bit of Symbian and it's EPOC-derived OS - a strong 32-bit OS that can run on everything from the original Psion PDAs to the new Nokia 7650 Smartphone (with camera). However, the OS doesn't have a standard user interface, so it will remain to be seen if Nokia can gather the other manufacturers around it's Series 60 UI concept, or whether the Symbian smartphone UI will end up being fragmented. Maybe things will clearer in February when Symbian releases details about "Hurricane" the next version of their OS.
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It continues. It's a long post that I wrote up and put online and submitted to Slashdot as an article. It didn't get accepted, but I still have it online. There's a few amazing things about this: 1) That I was as obsessed about mobile technologies last year around this time as I am today. 2) How much the mobile tech outlook hasn't changed in a year! The only difference between a year ago and now, is that I can actually get my hands on some of the stuff I was reading about! And 3) that I actually thought my server could handle a Slashdotting.
A year ago I wasn't blogging yet. I didn't start seriously until May of 2002, however, I had written and installed the first version of the Notebook on my server and started adding some infrequent content to it. The Notebook used the same exact database tables that runs the MiniBlog, the pages just weren't formatted as a blog with dates, and permalinks, etc. so all those posts from that system are still in there. The idea was that I wanted a dynamic way of adding content to my website - so I added what I was thinking of a personal Wiki, but with regular html instead of Wiki code. It wasn't a blog though (I don't know why I never noticed them before) so I still didn't add much content online.
To get my ideas out of my system, I was subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists and frequented Slashdot quite a bit. It wasn't as fulfilling as having a blog - but at the time it seemed to be my only option. I much prefer blogging now.
I've been waiting a month to post this! I knew I had that post online and I've been waiting to have a "Year ago today" post like everyone else. In May I'll have my blogiversary, but for now this is fun. In case anyone reading this blog is amazed at my "sudden" obsession with mobile tech, it really isn't sudden. I've been psycho about it for years now, I just was actually in a period of disillisionment when I started my blog. Now I'm back to "normal". ;-)
-Russ