The second thing is that there's no real reference to it running the AmigaDE, particularly in a native form, only references to Tao's VP. As we know, the DE can happily run on top of another OS - in fact the only way to currently use the DE is by running the developer kit on top of Linux or Windows. When the announcement first came out, I read the reference to the development being from one of the world's leading PDA developers to mean Palm. That's pure speculation on my part, so don't go reading anything into it, but the fact of the matter is that Palm have PalmOS 4.0 lined up, new colour devices, large market share and are probably one of the few companies who could ship a PDA device with AmigaDE technology running on it to the targetted 7 million users.
Palm have ARM-based systems in their development path, but at present still run on Dragonball CPUs which are basically variants of the 680X0 chip we all know and love from the Amiga. Of course, Palm have plenty of hardware and OS licensees, and a dedicated, enthusiastic core of developers which exceed the Amiga user base in size and resources. Palm also deliberately kept their OS and PDA simple and low- cost, at the time the introduction of colour was controversial and treated with much scepticism by many developers - Palm have wisely not tackled multimedia in any major depth.
Another possibility is the DE running on top of Linux which has become a favourite with some recent arrivals to the palmtop scene. Linux lacks a lean multimedia environment for smaller devices, and this could provide the key to allow Linux PDA developers to tap into such applications. The preference for VP code applications from the mysterious hardware developer doesn't yield any clues as to which option, if any, is the right one - C, C++ and Java are all acceptable for the applications development which again doesn't mean anything in itself.
Whether or not the PDAs are running the AmigaDE native, or hosted on another OS, or even if it's just the Tao kernel, there are some important results from this news. The first is that a leading PDA hardware developer has been in contact with Amiga, and has been sold on what Amiga and the Amiga community
