world gone mad

With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

The Treo 680* is an incremental enhancement to the older 650. It's a little smaller, and there are some great software updates in the OS and core applications as well as nice additions bundled in. I wonder if it could have been more of an upgrade, but overall it's got some really cool features if your current smartphone is getting long in the tooth.

Sad to say, my favorite features are by most counts minor: the 680 allows you to attach ringtones to a category in the contacts list (so all 300-some of my co-workers can identify themselves by "slow blues"), and it also can handle vCards (even those with 300-some entries).

* Highlight for photo, courtesy of Amazon