Comment Re:Will they run Linux? (Score 1) 272
Can you genuinely run a "complete development environment" or play any mainstream "strategy game" on an ARM computer, or do you have to run special versions targeted for a mobile distribution? Because if the latter, my point is still valid. Even if your APIs are all the same, the fact that the device is slower means you have to rewrite your applications, anyway, because the thing that took 1 microsecond now takes 10 milliseconds, and the fancy vector graphics that's there somewhere now uses up too much CPU. And if you have to write a dedicated distribution, then in reality it's a different OS. And you can do the same on a Windows Mobile or any other mobile OS; there is nothing fundamentally stopping you from targeting a larger screen and implementing a mobile replacement for Eclipse or Visual Studio. In fact, with the .NET Compact Framework releases closely following the regular .NET, you can probably recompile many existing .NET applications with minor changes to avoid the occasional API calls that aren't supported on the mobile platform. I think it's great to be able to run Linux or Windows XP on such devices, I'm just skeptical whether this would really make a difference for me as a user. As long as your code is written in a high-level language and uses standard APIs, it will probably take you a comparable amount of effort to customize and recompile your app for the regular OS vs. the "Mobile" version of it.