Interview with Paul on msmobilenews.com

[Guest]

Hello,

I can only fully agree to Paul's opinions !

In particular I am also (and have always been) firmly convinced that Smartphones and Pocket PCs can happily co-exist and won't be too much of a direct competition to each other.

There is as I think a simple reason: the size of the display !

As the word itself already says, a Smartphone's primary purpose is to serve as a PHONE. (Yes, and it is SMART, because it is able to provide much more performance than a "normal" phone.)

Anyway it is a natural desire of man to communicate and communicating via primary senses (talking, listening) is still - and I hopefully think it will stay that way - prevailing. (Communicating via emails is cute and serves its purpose as well, but even in the business world most arrangements are made in meetings, negotiations etc., i.e. non-electronically).

Hence it has become extremely important to communicate anywhere, anytime - via mobile phones.

As you have to carry them with you consequently you look for small and light phones, whose batteries last long.

What about my iPAQ ?

I love it and carry it with me as often as I can.

However I wouldn't carry it with me when going out with my girlfriend or hiking or doing leisure activities.

Why ?

Because it is too large, just beacuse of an other big advantage: its (relatively) large display.

So both devices serve their special purpose and despite various assessments by analysts they cannot convince me that this will be any different in the (near) future.

***

With one other statement by Paul I also totally agree:

I also so much lack the availability of "pure" programming languages, like Basic or Pascal !

I started to use PCs back in 1984 as an early adopter.

Learned Basic and Pascal and was able to program my own code at relatively simple effort.

Windows then brought a big improvement. On the other side it more and more becomes a black box (except for the high-professionals, who are experienced in C and the Windows internals).

Writing a simple routine in VB might be easy but the code often is unnecessarily large (no wonder, VB was not created for simple routines).

I hope someone will port e.g. PocketDOS for Smartphones or program a simple Pascal compiler for Smartphones and Pocket PC.

This would catch my interest 1000 times more than gaming around.

Does anyone know in particular if Basic or Pascal is going to be ported for Smartphone (Pocket PC) ?