C|Net News.com hosts two interesting articles about Danger, the company behind the HipTop handheld device which is a combination of wireless web-aware applications, PDA and a phone. The operating system for the device has been written from scratch (the kernel is the work of a team of ex-Be engineers, including Travis Geiselbrecht, who also brought us NewOS) while it also runs a Java VM. First article can be found here, and interview with Danger’s Rubin and Britt is here.
Handheld Plans: Danger Ahead?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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this looks very cool. for a couple years, I have been a Handspring fan, but have not been overly impressed with the treo. but, I’ll wait till danger releases a color screen version, as I already have a b&w pda and cell. If I want a combination device, I’d also like to upgrade my screen at the same time. the color treo screen does not look very good, imo.
so, hopefully danger will come out with a color version before a 320×320 palmos5 based handspring treo!
The greyscale saves A LOT battery. I know that this was the major reason they went after the greyscale. Do not forget that this is a phone too, so battery life is important.
I know, this is why the Treo was first released as a gray scale as well. But, I’ve been working with a grayscale pda for years now, and want color, and their FAQ says they will have color at some point, so, I will wait.
the pics make it look like a blackberry unit… sounds interesting, but their convergence market is getting crowded now… blacberry, treo, nokiapalm thing, qualcomms pdq thing, etc…
The device looks nice, but they need at least one BIG licensee with deep pockets. That will be hard to come by these days.
The special features/apps that they have will probably comeout for Palm OS 5, Symbian and PocketPC too. Even with the lower price, there will be stiff competition.
Palm will release a $100 device soon…
I lived in Japan for a number of years. They have really cool cell phones there and all of them (the cool ones) are color. I always put my phone and PDA in their respective cradles every night, so I never had a problem with battery life not being sufficient.
My experience has been that turning down the bright backlight on Color phones and PDAs helps tremendously if battery life is a concern though.
This is also the place Joe Palmer, the designer of the BeBox, went to. I think there’s another ex-Be engineer or two at the company.
From what I’ve heard, the ‘Hiptop’ has a couple advantages over the Blackberry that aren’t of the geek feature variety: one, it has a better-designed UI (hey, it counts for a lot in practice), and two, they’ve recognized that their real target is carriers. It’s still a risky proposition, but they have their act together–I don’t think their biggest market risk is competition from RIM and Palm as much as it is lethargy on the part of carriers in deploying the infrastructure necessary to support devices like this (and to support the ‘really cool’ cell phones BakaSmack is talking about).
It almost looks too good to be true… if they actually can stay in business selling something with that many features for that price, it will turn the whole market on its head it seems.
BTW- is it an OSnews rule that someone has to mention BeOS in every comments thread?
I know Brian is (was?) there: http://www.frotz.net/swetland/
I have some vague idea that Howard was too, but I could be off-base on that one.
I think more tech companies should publish the staff list. A lot of cool engineers have a “following”, and it give geek-credibility to a company to show off who they have.
Howard is not working there… 😉
>>>Palm will release a $100 device soon…
The problem is that they are very vague about the actual technical specs — one has to suspect that in order to produce a $100 PDA, they have to go with the old PalmOS 4.1 and the old dragonball cpu with this particular PDA.
It is very hard to compare a RIM (a 386 CPU with 2 Meg of RAM) vs. a Danger (ARM 7 with 16 Meg of RAM). What RIM spent their money on is their back-end enterprise level server programs. Like I said earlier in the Palm thread, Palm spent $11 million on Be engineers (and BeOS) but they were willing $250 million on the Extended System acquisition for its enterprise level softwares.
it’s only a matter of time. all we need is for the grayscale ones to fly off the shelves…
I had the chance of playing with a prototype a few months ago – very cool device! Unfortunately, there’s no provider for it here in Germany so …
They’ve got a very nice device there. The question though is regarding consumer demand for such devices and carrier’s slowness with network upgrades. Everything, i’ve seen to date suggests that most smartphone sales have been extremely disappointing, including the treo.
The danger device though seems very much targeted to a younger audience. That younger audience may have the need for such devices because they spend time together doing essentially nothing. That is they have the downtime to use such a device. I wish danger the best of luck because, again, they’ve built an awesome device.
It seems like half the people I either personally know or have just heard of in Silicon Valley are working for There. And none of them can describe exactly what they do There, yet.
>>It is very hard to compare a RIM (a 386 CPU with 2 Meg of RAM) vs. a Danger (ARM 7 with 16 Meg of RAM).
Hmmm, ARM 7 is impressive. Where are the hardware specs? Were are the specs for the OS? Can it scale for various handheld devices? Does it have multimedia yet? Bluetooth? 803.11b? Graphics?
I guess in this case the specific Device/OS combination is key. OS wize, Palm will probably beat them, but if they come out with a specific inexpensive, easy to use device with features for the masses that does not exist from any Palm licensees then they have a good chance.
>>>I guess in this case the specific Device/OS combination is key.
The key is the back-end enterprise stuff. RIM is just a smart pager with a 386 CPU and 2 Meg of RAM — all the magic is in the back-end enterprise software. Palm was willing to spend $250 million to acquire Extended Systems (when compared to the $11 million deal with Be).
The battle is in the back-end enterprise stuff, period.
The back end is also what Danger’s been concentrating on, too, actually–that’s part of what I meant about recognizing that their customers are carriers. The first article on CNET that Eugenia linked to in her article goes into some detail on that. An interesting quote about the competition: “Some companies, such as RIM and Palm, have started looking to the corporate market. ‘I’ve seen a lot of companies start in consumer and fail and say, “OK refocus, it’s enterprise because that’s where the deep pockets are,”‘ [Danger’s] Rubin said. ‘And those are the guys that really get burned in an economy like this–where enterprises aren’t spending any money.”
Heh. Some very good people at There.
I left There in January, however. I’ve worked for Sony Computer Entertainment America since then, in the playstation R&D group.
As far as Danger goes, some outstanding engineers from Be went there, and knowing what I do about the HipTop I am sure it is very very cool.
I left There in January, however. I’ve worked for Sony Computer Entertainment America since then…
One of the friends I referred to who recently joined There came from an entertainment division of Sony (one that did ‘location-based entertainment’).
Not that that’s an amazing coincidence, but at times I suspect there are only a couple hundred tech people in Silicon Valley who shuttle back and forth between the same companies constantly.