RE: newkidontheblockDon't forget symbian,
Just bought a Sony Ericcson P800, does everything a blackberry does and more (WP, Spreadsheet, Database, still/video camera, phone), and sync's with corpooarte (IMAP) and pop3 (yahoo, hotmail) mail servers, and has Bluetooth for wirless synching to PC. Software not so new, been on Psion's for several years. Think RIM have woken up to this see latest devices, they take on the Internet phone head on, as well as maintaining backward compatibility with their proprietary wirelss network. It's a straight 4 way fight, RIM, PalOS, MS PocketPC, Symbian. Currently in Europe / Asia, symbian is outselling PocketPC 15:1 on phones. RIm just launched very good looking machine for corporate and non corporate market, loks very much like Palm Tungsten. Going to be an interesting fight. Most phone companies have adopted Symbian but P800 is first offering to go head to head with MS smartphone, Palm TungstenW and latest RIM internet phones.
Re Accovia. Looks like they provided the same service TT/SB does when modems were slow, leased lines slow and expensive, so character based green screens was the only option. UNIX platform was (and still is) a good choice. Web has been an after thought. Weakness will most likely be in inability to deliver rich content, now possible with high speed broadband, faster servers, large hard drives and as recent NR said, separate database to store BLOB's (binarly large objects) pictures to you and me. Oracle as an RDBMS made this transition very easy for SCS. Unix is still a very good platform to run Oracle on, so accovia skills in managing UNIX servers still very relevant.
JMO
Idle