hi, i work in R&D dept in my university, and the other day the engeniers where talking about building a device that can keep all their software for robots, for control them, testing etc without a laptop. Some of them said that a Palm would be better because of the power and bla bla bla , others say a pocket pc. i think those 2 are open for developers. i know that the iphone and ipod touch have a very powerfull procesor,all this core stuff, and an amazing screen. but, how accesible is all that power. and how dificult is to programing into them. so, what will you chose ?

1) palm
2) pocket pc
3) iphone/itouch
4)building a custom device using an ARM, about 100 MIPS

PD. i realy dont know cuz im in the R&D dept as a designer but they tell me that creating custom software from scratch in the ARM procesor would be very powerfull. Just whant to know you opinion tx

From what I know of the iTouch and iPhone they both use fairly powerful CPUs..somewhere in the neighborhood of 400mhz if memory serves me. Even when hacked though a fair portion of the available resources are eaten up by the UI..which really isnt neccesary for robotics applications.

The main downside as i see it is hardware expansion. Im sure someone has developed or is developing some nifty hardware hacks for the device; But why would you want to have to hack a device to make it do what you want, when there are plenty of open devices that already have those capabilities. (other than the gee-whiz/just-because-you-can factor)

gumstix might be a nice off-the-shelf solution: http://gumstix.com/store/catalog/pro...roducts_id=170

iPhone's processor is the most powerful in the market.
667 MHZ, RAM 512 MB, ROM 128 MB.
That's why Safari is so fast.
Other smart phones may have 400+ MHZ processor (HTC Tytn )
But the RAM is too small.

Originally Posted by lolec

hi, i work in R&D dept in my university, and the other day the engeniers where talking about building a device that can keep all their software for robots, for control them, testing etc without a laptop. Some of them said that a Palm would be better because of the power and bla bla bla , others say a pocket pc. i think those 2 are open for developers. i know that the iphone and ipod touch have a very powerfull procesor,all this core stuff, and an amazing screen. but, how accesible is all that power. and how dificult is to programing into them. so, what will you chose ?

1) palm
2) pocket pc
3) iphone/itouch
4)building a custom device using an ARM, about 100 MIPS

PD. i realy dont know cuz im in the R&D dept as a designer but they tell me that creating custom software from scratch in the ARM procesor would be very powerfull. Just whant to know you opinion tx

Originally Posted by mikewen

iPhone's processor is the most powerful in the market.
667 MHZ, RAM 512 MB, ROM 128 MB.
That's why Safari is so fast.
Other smart phones may have 400+ MHZ processor (HTC Tytn )
But the RAM is too small.

This Article says the iphone has 128mb for ram not 512mb. Where did you hear it has 512?

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...5A410D108.html

You are right, my mistake.

iPhone Memory:
Modem (S-GOLD2)
Intel wireless flash - 32 Mbits of NOR coupled with 16 Mbits of SRAM for code execution
Application CPU
RAM (128 Mbytes - 2 x 512 Mbit dies stacked in Application CPU package)
Flash (8 GBytes or 4 GBytes NAND - Samsung K9MCG08U5M (4 GB K9HBG08U1M) -

Originally Posted by peteo

This Article says the iphone has 128mb for ram not 512mb. Where did you hear it has 512?

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...5A410D108.html

The iPhone is without a doubt the most powerful phone/PDA on the market right now. The problem? You wouldn't know it because all that power is hidden behind Apple's (although beautiful) closed UI design.

Just to put this in perspective. iPhone = 600mhz ARM, Nokia n800 = 300mhz arm.

...and 128mb of RAM is a lot for a mobile device, that's for sure. I also believe that a graphics accelerator is in there somewhere.

ok, its clear that the iphone is the most powefull device of its type, but is all this power accessible to developers? or they are so limited they cant use all this resources?