I disagree about the need.
Most ham user radio interfaces, esp for handhelds, are crap. Of course lots of shack radios are run with computers already, and there's SDR sets too. It's just painful to enter a new repeater on a radio you haven't used before; feels like programming a VCR. And the cheap Baofeng's are a case in point. The underlying things you're doing, entering some text or number strings and settings, via a menu system, isn't conceptually difficult, it's made difficult by stupid interface.
I guess folks here haven't shopped for radios much lately, but Yaesu, Icom, and others all now have touchscreens; take a look at the FT2DR. Guess they're iSheep over there....
I dunno why they'd be slow to transmit. Are you referring to operating controls? Folks already use a variety of mobile devices to do stuff like data (APRS is a good example). This just seems to be like the already existent computer control that desktops have been using for a while, squashed into a handheld.
Still, it's two devices (sorta like one of the Delorme beacon thingees) with the phone being the frontend. I know a lot of business users that have to keep going from hand to hand between radio and phone, and this might actually work really well for them. We'll see.
Maybe it will work with the Earl....:wings:
