> I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class

Why not?  You could run Squeak natively on the iPAQ when the Squeak OS
project gets to that stage.

The description of Jamie Robertson's work sounds like it would port nicely
to the iPAQ: "We did another bare chip Squeak VM port at Disney. Jamie
Robertson ported Squeak to a StrongARM developer's board. He wrote the
display driver, touch screen driver, timer support, and basic access to a
FAT16 file system on a compact flash card and it worked pretty nicely. There
were some issues with noise in the touch-screen hardware that he had to
overcome, but the effort only took three or four weeks. We didn't bother
with sound I/O."  Plus, they could pick up hardware interface and power
management code from the handhelds.org linux project.

Throw in the redboot loader so that you can keep the HTC loader resident,
and you'd be in very good shape.

	--- Noel