the founding of the Compaq Laptop Battery web site and the Open Handhelds program, which has as its goal the continued support of Linux on the iPaq, making the device available to the research/development community.
While the Itsy team choose Linux as their operating system, Greeley admits that, within Compaq, his research team is pretty “operating system agnostic”. He adds, “I think what’s more critical than necessarily the OS choice is the notion of going open source, to be able to share and interchange the fruits of many people’s efforts and to have access to a wide variety of applications that are out there, which makes innovation really possible.”
The transition from Itsy to iPaq took place when the newly Compaq’d Itsy research team went looking around the company for a new home for the project. Greeley says they found that home in Compaq’s iAppliances Group, who had been working on an iPaq desktop PC and a new StrongARM-based handheld pocket PC. The iAppliances pocket device did not have the Itsy’s 3-D accelerometer, but it did have the memory and expansion capabilities the Itsy researchers wanted. As Greeley said, “We proposed to them: Hey, let’s launch this, what we’ll call the Open Handheld program…We’ll take our Linux port that we had originally done for Itsy, get it up to the latest revision of the Linux kernel, and at the same time, adapt it to work with the iPaq. This would be a great way to get people innovating on our platform.”
As for what might be called the Itsy/iPaq premium, Dick Greeley points to a number of things he believes help set his handheld