03/08/2003 Interview with Jonatan Fernstad- the man behind clievideo.com.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience with PDAs and technology in general
I am a basketball playing technology enthusiast that live in the beautiful summer city of Stockholm, Sweden. My first PDA was a Palm Vx [ imagine a PDA with the V form factor, 320x480 16 bit color screen and Virtual Grafitti - sounds pretty good doesnt it? :) ] and since then I have had numerous other Palm OS PDA´s. Next after developing software for the Palm OS platform the technology/science subjects that interests me the most are Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. These subjects are something that I see myself working with more in the future as the processing power of computers increase further and I am also looking at incorporating the "smart computer" concept in one or two Palm OS applications later this year.
What PDA do you currently use and why?
I use most of the CLIE OS 5 devices daily while developing and testing applications. For personal use its either the NX70V or the TG50. The TG50 for its portable size and bluetooth and the NX70V for the camera and the 320x480 screen. The 2 Mp camera of the NZ90 is nice but it really is too big to carry around all the time, and until I get used to Grafitti2 or Decuma the NX73V will stay in it's cradle aswell. Its too bad that they had to get rid of the old Grafitti input system. [ It will probably take some time until I can forgive Xerox and buy one of their products again... ;)
Why make Lightspeed?
The XScale CPU of the Sony OS 5 devices are designed by intel to be able to run at a variety of different Bus and CPU speeds. Sony had its devices run at a CPU speed of 200 Mhz all the time which was unnecessarily high for some applications - resulting in battery life being shorter than it needed to be -, and too low for some applications that require or performs better with higher Bus and CPU speeds. With Lightspeed you can change these settings individually for all applications, which results in increased battery life and increased performance. Also, writing an overclocking application for Sony's OS 5 devices was something that was thought of as being 'impossible' within the Palm OS developer community - and I like challenges :)
Do you have any specific plans to improve it further?
Yes, the next thing to implement is support for the NX73V and NX80V. After that we will look at supporting the Tungsten C aswell as the SGH-i500 from Samsung and other future models that will have a XScale CPU.
What's your favourite book?
My absolute favourite book is "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by the late Douglas Adams. It is a brilliant and insanely funny piece of comedy, science fiction and adventure. It is one of the few books that actually makes me laugh out loud while reading it, it features many interesting characters and it also gives the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. For those of you who have not read it, I highly recommend that you do. And for those who have - read it again :).
Give me 3 reasons why you think Lightspeed will be a success
1) Lightspeed has been thoroughly tested on the different supported devices to make sure that the available settings work satisfyingly on the different devices. 2) The User Interface have been designed to be intuitive and user friendly. 3) During development I found myself testing several games and emulators such as Liberty and Phoinix with Lightspeed for much longer time than was needed to see if they were compatible... The increase in performance and gaming experience when running emulators/games at higher Bus and Clock speed are quite big and playing these games are much more fun now with Lightspeed. :)
What one feature would you like to see in a future PDA?
That would be a powerful PDA equipped with a camera and a 3G chip which would make it possible to do wireless video conferencing in excellent video quality
Do you think the Smartphone will ultimately kill the PDA format?
None of the available smartphones have been attractive enough to replace my current cell phone ( Sony Ericsson t68i ). In my opinion they are either too bulky, are missing some feature ( like bluetooth ) or both. The coming SGH-i500 looks pretty interesting though, I will have to try it out in person to see how big it is before making up my mind about using it as my primary cell phone. I think that the PDA format is here to stay for quite some time - they will become somewhat smaller in size and weigh less but since the PDA is getting more and more advanced people will still want the larger screen for playing games,viewing detailed documents and high resolution movies.
Anything you would like to add?
I could perhaps mention that we have another product in the pipeline that is in the later stages of development. I can't reveal much about it right now but I can say that this is an application that many CLIE users have been asking for for a long time now :).
If you want more information on the applications talked about here please visit clievideo. Many thanks to Jonatan for taking the time to answer my questions.