iPhone SDK, Android, and the Release of Pi

"When will the deeda Pi be released?" This is the single most common question we receive at deeda Inc. And although the above pictures and title may appear a bit ominous, we assure you that you'll be excited about this news.

First, a little background on our handset efforts with Pi:

Here's a quick excerpt from an email between our founder and Jeff Rozmus of Wolfson Microelectronics from 2007:

"...The obvious problem is that we can't finalize our specs until this (funding) is complete - we've been in a holding pattern since 2006 - For example, last year the best camera option that worked with our BOM pricing was a 2.0 megapixel model from Alps Electric - this summer we were able to upgrade it to 5.0 megapixels for the same price per unit...

Assuming we cannot secure manufacturing capital until the second quarter of next year, we will continue to make such final adjustments to our device components in order to maintain the most competitive product possible. In our last conversation (December '05), when I sat with you in your Cambridge office,our discussion centered around our need for ICs that incorporated touch screen controllers - at that time I showed you our device design for our capacitive touch screens and inquired if Wolfson would be able to supply us specific integrated chip sets related to our design - You mentioned that Wolfson was developing an IC for January or February '06 that integrated a few of our requirements including a touch screen controller - you also mentioned that there would be other ICs available through your '06 schedule that would fit our specific needs. (This included Audio/Video codecs - specific controllers - and power management solutions (our main concern at that time was power management and device hardware controllers, since we were running a 3.6" screen) You also asked about with processor we were working with and we had settled with the Freescale MX family of processors (depending our device model we were using various MX processors - with Pi getting the best of the MX family)

The initial cost estimate by Design Continuum was $1.5 Million, but we've held off on this investment until we know we can immediately follow up with a product in the market. As I'm sure you know the minimum cost to manufacture and distribute a handset through Foxconn or Flextronics is around $25 Million. Had we invested with Design Continuum, today we would be left with a considerable amount of additional cost to redesign our PCBs, device components and other hardware layers for the latest ICs or other chipsets - Thus wasting a considerable amount of capital for a non-manufacturing spec. set of devices.

Therefore, we believe the best investment of our capital is to roll final integration and development costs into our pilot builds (that can then be used as prototype/demo models) and then continue with large scale device manufacturing and distribution. So our ugly dev boards and breadboards aside, we've been caught in a holding pattern until we can reach these investment goals. Being such a young company, securing the needed funding has been considerably challenging. I'd like to point out that it's important for us to keep an open dialog between our companies during this process, as we still intend to be loyal to using Wolfson Microelectronic solutions for our products..."

November of 2007 introduced the world to Google's Android OS, and this month we've been introduced to the iPhone's SDK. Without going into our specific approach with each of these platforms in this post, let's take a closer look at what we've decided to do with the device side of the deeda ecosystem.


Google's Android appeared on the scene as the doubleganger of the original deeda device OS. Linux + Open Source, Open Platform - Android, in many ways, was a great blessing for us. There's so much everyone in the industry can learn from Android. As we struggled with our funding issues to large scale device manufacturing, when we first looked at Android late last year, our answer was simple: Build on it. So at this time we have been busy developing a deeda-on-Android solution to compliment the device component of the deeda ecosystem. Our goal is simple: Ensure that users have access to their content anywhere at anytime.

If this can be accomplished through a wireless device running deeda-on-Android, and if our user's are interested in purchasing such a device, then we must make a concerted effort to provide a solution that will work with Android. For this reason, we've been quietly working on this effort since the start of this year. We will release more details on our work and progress in this area as details become available.

Apple's iPhone SDK - The bittersweet option. While various "closed" features on Apple's early SDK may make an ideal deeda-on-iPhone solution a little less robust than we would like to see - once again it is our duty to our community to explore every viable option for the device side of the deeda ecosystem. In many ways seeing our application running on a full-screen capacitive-touch device will be really sweet.

With "project deeda" originally being born under the internal code name "Apple Juice", it is understandable how all of us at deeda taste a bit of bitterness in our mouths as we discuss this option. However, in the end the facts cannot be denied - even with a 2 year lead, and our own IPs, designs, and development partnerships - deeda Inc. was still unable to beat Apple to market due to a lack of funding. A year after the iPhone debut, our funding challenges for large scale manufacturing of Kiku, Menx and Pi remain. However, our commitment to create a seamlessly unified web, desktop, and device ecosystem remains focused and strong.

Whether the device component of deeda's ecosystem will be completed through Android, iPhone SDK, our own devices (or all of the above) - we promise that we are working hard to ensure that our customers will have the broadest options for devices that will work with our community.