Thomas Knierim
8th July 2008, 01:45 PM
Smart phones or PDAs anyone?
When I arrived in Thailand in the early nineties, one had to go to the post office to make an international phone call, because not every house had the capability to dial out internationally. There were people queuing up in front of a plexiglass booths in order to shout phrases into clunky receivers and the voice signal was then relayed to another clunky receiver in another continent at ridiculous prices. A few years later, consumer mobile phones appeared and took Asia by storm. Mobile phones suddenly became the poor man's status symbol. My first one was a black brick-shaped Siemens that weighed half a pound. It could store 40 numbers, worked only half of the time and needed its own power plant for recharging.
Yesterday I made another phone call to my family in Germany. I was sitting on the veranda using my Pocket PC for a 20-min call which costed absolutely nothing except for the power charges and the Internet subscriber fee. The call was routed via Skype over my home Wifi to an Internet server in Germany from where it went straight to my familiy's home Wifi. In adddition to voice, the same line is able to carry text, data, and video. It seems that communication technology has come a long way during the last 15 years. But there is more to it. The device I used to make that call is roughly twice as powerful as the Unix computer that served 50 students at my university back in the 80s. It is still more powerful than a standard desktop PC of the mid 90s and it has about ten times as much memory.
I would probably not venture to develop and run enterprise business applications on such a small device, but that's exactly what we did 12 years ago if one compares the computing power of the then servers with today's Pocket PCs. Back then, SQL databases and company networks were powered by devices with a similar footprint. The Pocket PC's processor speed of 520 MHz is 20 times that of my very first i386 Tower and its 384 MB RAM is roughly ten times more than that of my first hard disk, which costed $1500 and took up half of my desk. The device has a 4GB micro SD card which appears utopian compared to the onboard memory of my first digi-cam.
It's also a lot more fun to work with, if I might add. My first Siemens "brick" phone ended up in a Bangkok canal into which I flung it after it had refused service for the umptieth time. Even today, I remember that "plop" with some merriment. I've been using my last two PDAs with significantly increased enthusiasm. I use them as a phone, alarm clock, calculator, ad-hoc camera, dictionary, address book, MP3 player and I read newspapers and books on them. Given such versatile functionality, these devices have become pretty much part of daily life for me. Thomas, the gadget man? Occasionally, I leave my Pocket PC at home to remember what life without computers is like. Of course, last time I did that I started missing the GPS when we were out in the jungle.
Cheers, Thomas
When I arrived in Thailand in the early nineties, one had to go to the post office to make an international phone call, because not every house had the capability to dial out internationally. There were people queuing up in front of a plexiglass booths in order to shout phrases into clunky receivers and the voice signal was then relayed to another clunky receiver in another continent at ridiculous prices. A few years later, consumer mobile phones appeared and took Asia by storm. Mobile phones suddenly became the poor man's status symbol. My first one was a black brick-shaped Siemens that weighed half a pound. It could store 40 numbers, worked only half of the time and needed its own power plant for recharging.
Yesterday I made another phone call to my family in Germany. I was sitting on the veranda using my Pocket PC for a 20-min call which costed absolutely nothing except for the power charges and the Internet subscriber fee. The call was routed via Skype over my home Wifi to an Internet server in Germany from where it went straight to my familiy's home Wifi. In adddition to voice, the same line is able to carry text, data, and video. It seems that communication technology has come a long way during the last 15 years. But there is more to it. The device I used to make that call is roughly twice as powerful as the Unix computer that served 50 students at my university back in the 80s. It is still more powerful than a standard desktop PC of the mid 90s and it has about ten times as much memory.
I would probably not venture to develop and run enterprise business applications on such a small device, but that's exactly what we did 12 years ago if one compares the computing power of the then servers with today's Pocket PCs. Back then, SQL databases and company networks were powered by devices with a similar footprint. The Pocket PC's processor speed of 520 MHz is 20 times that of my very first i386 Tower and its 384 MB RAM is roughly ten times more than that of my first hard disk, which costed $1500 and took up half of my desk. The device has a 4GB micro SD card which appears utopian compared to the onboard memory of my first digi-cam.
It's also a lot more fun to work with, if I might add. My first Siemens "brick" phone ended up in a Bangkok canal into which I flung it after it had refused service for the umptieth time. Even today, I remember that "plop" with some merriment. I've been using my last two PDAs with significantly increased enthusiasm. I use them as a phone, alarm clock, calculator, ad-hoc camera, dictionary, address book, MP3 player and I read newspapers and books on them. Given such versatile functionality, these devices have become pretty much part of daily life for me. Thomas, the gadget man? Occasionally, I leave my Pocket PC at home to remember what life without computers is like. Of course, last time I did that I started missing the GPS when we were out in the jungle.
Cheers, Thomas