Amiga Handhelds© John Chandler
Mar 25, 2001
If you've been reading the Amiga news sites, mailing lists or newsgroups you should be aware of the
recent buzz about a request for Amiga developers to provide content for a leading PDA manufacturer due
to release new hardware real soon now. The work is under NDA, so public details are sketchy at best, but
this announcement fills in another piece of the puzzle and defines the very low end of the hardware
spectrum we've seen building up in recent months - from the high end desktops ('home servers'), to set
top boxes, and now to devices that can fit in your pocket.
From what we can gather there are at least two types of PDAs, both colour though with differing screen
resolutions: 240x320 for one, 176x220 for the other. They also appear to be very small in memory, with
500k being mentioned as the capacity for games and applications, and have "CPU speed limitations". We
could well be looking at something closer to the current Palm devices, or even mobile phones, than the
Pocket PC machines running Windows. Outside the embedded systems marketplace, Amiga developers
are a good source of developers for this area, we're used to having less memory or CPU power to work
with in contrast to other desktop platforms. Now, two things immediately struck me when reading the various snippets about this development task.
The first one is the fact that Amiga are claiming to have about 7 million of these devices sold by the end
of 2001. Yep, 7 million by the end of this year. To put this in perspective, Palm sold about 5 million
PDAs last year (and they're the major player), while Palm licensees Handspring clocked up a respectable
1 million or thereabouts. The market is dominated by the Palm devices, it's the leading brand name and
one almost everyone goes for. Pocket PC (WinCE under a new guise) devices are trailing, but making
slight gains, Psion are also still in there. New entries have tough competition, there's no denying that, and
I have to admit to being very sceptical of the 7 million target, especially for a new platform. Assuming it's a new platform. The simple fact of the matter is we don't know what the business plan is,
we don't know costs, proper specifications, we don't know about any deals or anything else to accurately
say whether the target is achievable or not. We don't even know the hardware developer which could
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