Tempe, AZ — (press release) — DevelopOnline announced today that the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC and Intel StrongARM platforms now are available on DevelopOnline.com for the online development of handheld products and applications. DevelopOnline.com is a collaborative, online development center for programmers, innovators, and engineers to design new products or improve upon existing products over the Web. With hundreds of new projects underway within the first three weeks of DevelopOnline operation, the development community is proving their hunger for access to new product platforms. With the addition of the new Compaq and Intel platforms, DevelopOnline addresses the developers' desire to harness new platforms for one of the most rapidly growing application areas — handheld products.

International Data Corp. expects that the number of handheld companions will grow to 18.9 million units by 2003. “The Compaq iPAQ handheld and Intel StrongARM platforms enable innovators to unleash their talents on a new class of platforms, allowing some to consider for the first time portable applications,” said Alan Steinberg, CEO of DevelopOnline. “One out of every two DevelopOnline.com visitors has begun a new development project, and we're glad to bring them new design platforms for the hot area of handheld devices.”

In the DevelopOnline environment, the Compaq iPAQ H3600 platform allows innovators to develop applications that run on Linux and download them to a Compaq iPAQ handheld device. Linux is one of the leading, open source software platforms, and DevelopOnline.com users can collaborate with other Linux developers on their projects.

Intel's StrongARM development platform will provide greater design flexibility for handheld and portable devices. With the restrictions of small, low power devices, DevelopOnline.com users will benefit from the platform's high-performance and many functions to make application development of this type more efficient.

DevelopOnline's technology helps innovators, engineers and programmers instantly improve upon existing products and applications or choose to create entirely new ones online. DevelopOnline provides instant access to the hardware components, software building blocks and technical services they need to take a paper-napkin drawing and carry it to full-scale production, resulting in faster time to market and increased revenue.

DevelopOnline's new framework is providing opportunities for technology leaders to bring new service offerings to support online developers. Two of the first to capitalize on this opportunity are Avnet and MontaVista Software, who both Tuesday announced new service offerings for the Compaq, Intel and other platforms available at DevelopOnline.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.