OpenMoko ON the iPhone

[Tomasz Zielinski]

2007/1/12, Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org>:

> the good news is that it can be generic enough to handle
> these different devices...

The bad news is they all have different screen resolutions, so
application for different screen size will loose 95% of functionality,
regardless of applied workaround.

Remember J2ME "standard". It's specification was way too wide so it
accepted and tried to unify GUI for phones with (i.e.) 72x96 pixel and
352x416 screens. We know how it ended - if you are mobile java games
developer, you have to fork your project to gazillion
resolution/phone_vendor/phone_model combinations and support every one
individually (and almost every mobile phone model has own set of J2ME
implementation glitches).

Windows CE and PocketPC also suffers - all non-standard resolution
and/or screen orientation makes users cry.

In fact only PalmOS had reasonable resolution - they simply quadrupled
screen size from 160x160 to 320x320, which makes backward
compatibility a piece of cake.

I wish OpenMoko will grow in monocultural hardware environment, to
avoid mentioned problems too early...

-- 
Tomek Z.
tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com