Hey Again,
A quick update - I recieved an email response from Shawn which can be found at the bottom of this post for anyone interested. Oh and I take back the personality comment I made about Shawn -- he was VERY polite and in sunny spirit's this time. That'll teach me to be overly critical!
About the screen lighting issues mentioned:
Hmmm. I hadn't heard about that yet. But as soon as you started describing it I immediately conjured the memory of how the SL-5500 had a dark spot at the top right of the lcd display that irked the snot out of me the whole time I used it. I'll have to look into it and see if it's a deal-breaker for me.
About the comments on TheKompany.com's software:
I guess it's a YMMV thing. Myself, my wife and both children use many of the tkc apps very rigorously, my wife even runs her business out of them exclusively. I can see however that if you were primarily looking to tkc for Video playback and such it would be dissapointing- it's their weakest app as far as I'm concerned. The games, email, PIM progs are all first rate with very little competition at their level imho. I can't really say anything concerning Rekall - it's the only one of their apps that I do not own. It's MUCH more expensive than most of thier offerings and seemed to be massive overkill for my uses.
The negatives that I can think of off the top of my head are things like data sync'ing in the PIM's - it only works on the SL-5500, which would be completely unaccpetable except for the fact that with most ROM's available for the Zaurii right now it is an almost universal problem affecting every other PIM suite I can think of as well to one degree or another. The other negative is that they seem totally unconcerned about releasing thier products in packages that would run off of the most popular Zaurii Rom's in use today. I think he could GREATLY expand their sales if they would simply recompile for the other OS's and work towards porting them to pdaXrom etc. But for now anyway it looks like I'm still stuck with Sharp/Cacko if I'm going to be able to enjoy my investments in their software. =(
I'm still glad to see they are porting to the Nokia 770. It shows good health in the developer's eyes to Nokia in general. I still may end up buying a 770 even with the negative issues simply because I think they'll get those things wrinkled out in future products - I just can't convince myself that a company that is working so hard to help the grass-roots community would turn a deaf ear to the grass-roots complaints and suggestions for improvements in their physical product. And I must admit - compared to Sharps side of things the Grass is DEFINITELY greener on the Nokia 770 side of the fence!
OK...here's that email:
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At 01:10 AM 2/25/2006, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I'm a longtime customer of your embedded products, (I believe I've
>purchased every available embedded offering you've ever released for both
>the SL-5500 and the clamshell models.) Naturally I was very excited to
>find that you announced on your website on December 5, 2005 that you were
>in the process of porting your embedded offerings to the Nokia 770
>platform! I can't seem to find any further information on your site about
>that though. Can you please tell me what kind of time frame we may be
>looking at for the release of these versions? Also which apps are you
>working on porting first?
Actually we just finished our game tkcPanels (got distracted with a
bunch of VOIP work the last 2 months) yesterday and made it available
for sale, but I'm not announcing it until I get the screenshots up,
just waiting on the webmaster right now.
>Thank you very much, I will be posting your response in the Nokia 770
>forum at the OESF Zaurus forums website so that others will know what's up
>and hopefully generate some excitement for both the 770 platform and
>thekompany.com as well. I think you guys can REALLY fill a whole that is
>left in the PIM and productivity software area for the 770 right now.
>There is GREAT sales potential if you can beat others to the market as
>you'll have complete dominance in this niche. At the VERY least it's
>definitely exciting news - I hope you guys can pull it off.
well, we're trying to figure out what applications make sense for us
to port, I didn't think PIM would sell well on the Zaurus and it
ended up being our biggest seller, so I guess I'm not that great and
understanding the market . I'm also trying to arrange with nokia
so that we can sell the devices and at least make them available for
a bit cheaper than at other places, and/or include some piece of
software. Anyway, I appreciate your enthusiasm, and we'll do stuff
as fast as we can, but remember, these are total re-writes of the
applications, there is virtually no code that can just be ported
because the 770 is C based and not C++, it's a bit slow going.
best,
shawn
>Hope to hear from you soon!
>
>-NeuroShock
Regards,
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.comwww.mindawn.com949-713-3276
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Be Safe All,
-NeuroShock
