[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by jerrytex

As a developer of a rather substancial commerical PPC application (30 forms, 600k), with this pricing structure I cannot afford to buy Kiosk without having at least 3 companies wanting it. Otherwise, the price of my app gets distorted.

It seems that you're looking at Spb Kiosk as a developer plug-in for your application, like a control - that's not what it is. Spb Kiosk is aimed at enterprises that deploy Pocket PCs and want to lock them down, not developers who want their application to have the ability to go full screen and lock out everything else.

An enterprise would buy your application, then buy Spb Kiosk to secure their devices with it. Or, alternatively, you could add the cost of Spb Kiosk into your deployment pricing quotes as an option to the enterprises interested in your application. They have your app for one price, and if they want to secure their device with an end to end solution, you bundle in Spb Kiosk. Maybe include Sprite Software's Clone software for even faster deployment. ;-)

When you consider that Spb Kiosk is a one-time fee, for a flat-rate unlimited deployment, it's not expensive at all for an enterprise. Expensive would be a per-unit licensing scheme.

Originally Posted by jerrytex

Please note the few comments made about Kiosk and half the comments were its price. This should be telling you something.

If the comments included some sort of validation information like you just provided, I'd take them more seriously. But the truth is, 60% of the posts on Pocket PC Thoughts are someone complaining about how expensive something is. Whether it's this app or a new action game, there's always a segment of people that complain about pricing.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by jerrytex

As a developer of a rather substancial commerical PPC application (30 forms, 600k), with this pricing structure I cannot afford to buy Kiosk without having at least 3 companies wanting it. Otherwise, the price of my app gets distorted.

It seems that you're looking at Spb Kiosk as a developer plug-in for your application, like a control - that's not what it is. Spb Kiosk is aimed at enterprises that deploy Pocket PCs and want to lock them down, not developers who want their application to have the ability to go full screen and lock out everything else.

An enterprise would buy your application, then buy Spb Kiosk to secure their devices with it. Or, alternatively, you could add the cost of Spb Kiosk into your deployment pricing quotes as an option to the enterprises interested in your application. They have your app for one price, and if they want to secure their device with an end to end solution, you bundle in Spb Kiosk. Maybe include Sprite Software's Clone software for even faster deployment. ;-)

When you consider that Spb Kiosk is a one-time fee, for a flat-rate unlimited deployment, it's not expensive at all for an enterprise. Expensive would be a per-unit licensing scheme.

Originally Posted by jerrytex

Please note the few comments made about Kiosk and half the comments were its price. This should be telling you something.

If the comments included some sort of validation information like you just provided, I'd take them more seriously. But the truth is, 60% of the posts on Pocket PC Thoughts are someone complaining about how expensive something is. Whether it's this app or a new action game, there's always a segment of people that complain about pricing.

[Steven Cedrone]

Remember this article???

It seems to me, MacDonalds is a prime candidate to use this. No problems with the employees messing up the devices and causing the whole project to fail...

Steve

[Scott R]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

It seems that you're looking at Spb Kiosk as a developer plug-in for your application, like a control - that's not what it is. Spb Kiosk is aimed at enterprises that deploy Pocket PCs and want to lock them down, not developers who want their application to have the ability to go full screen and lock out everything else.

And my question is: Can the latter be done using VS.NET 2003? Does anyone know the answer to that?

I have no problem with SPB's pricing. They can charge whatever they want. I couldn't afford to buy it and, in fact, I have no need/desire to completely lock-down a device, merely have an app take over the entire screen and capture hard button presses. IMO, being able to do this should be easy using VS.NET. But is it?

Scott

[werner123]

Originally Posted by vassiliphilippov

This is price for the development tool - Spb Kiosk Engine Builder that allows you building many kiosk mode applications and installing them to unlimited number of devices.

If you consider ROI it will be a very good number because kiosk mode really safes money on support.

Vassili Philippov
Spb Software House

Vassili Philippov said that you can use the engine to create and install unlimited number of devices. But this is not what the licence agreement on Pocketgear says. I quote:

[quote="www.pocketgear.com"]

License
You can download Spb Kiosk Engine Builder - a desktop application that generates kiosk packages. After registering your version, you can create different packages with different settings. Spb Kiosk Engine price includes 100 runtime Pocket PC licenses. So you can install built kiosk runtime to 100 Pocket PC devices.

So which is it? 100 or unlimited? If really unlimited, then I agree that the price might not be as bad as I originally thought, but I can still not afford it as well.