Most CAD software, however, involves only viewing and so fat-fingered editing is not an issue. How to see the drawing under our finger? GStarsoft’s MC uses a bird’s-eye view window, while Samsung is reintroducing the stylus to some tablets. Human Interaction: Portable devices require that we use our relatively fat fingers to navigate. Others save drawings to the cloud, which does the conversion (as with AutoCAD WS). Some CAD systems use the Save As command to convert files for portable devices, as does GStarCAD. Nearly all CAD vendors convert files to a more compact form, stripping out unneeded information. Generally, portable devices cannot display drawings in original CAD formats, because the files are too large. In contrast, Apple doesn’t report RAM amounts, leaving developers to guess at what’s available. With time, the limits will lift Samsung is showing 2GB models. The CAD program, drawing data, and other running programs all have to fit inside of 512MB or 1GB of memory. Desktop Windows has paging (data too big for computer’s memory is moved to the hard drive temporarily) that’s not available on portable devices. Small Working RAM: Available RAM has a hard limit, as little as 256MB (in early iPhones). Microsoft with Windows 8 Mobile wants to make it easy to port desktop apps to ARM CPUs. In one attempt to overcome the problem, Intel is porting Android to Atom CPUs. Therefore, CAD vendors have to write much of their software from scratch. Android allows apps to be installed from any source.ĬPU Incompatibility: The primary problem that the ARM CPU used by nearly all smartphones and tablets is its incompatibility with Intel CPUs used by desktop computers. Android adjusts to any resolution of any screen.Īpple users must go through the company’s App Store and apps cannot be “side loaded” CAD vendors cannot launch iOS software on their own timetable (they have to wait for Apple’s approval), nor can they issue updates quickly. Google is fixing fragmentation slowly nevertheless, new releases of Android aren’t on even relatively new devices, whereas Apple is good at supporting old devices.Īpple’s iOS is not resolution-independent, and so developers write apps twice, once for lower resolution iPhones and again for higher resolution iPads. When Google issues updates, it can be too much work to modify the mods. The operating system is freely available, and so anyone can modify it, resulting in hundreds of variations. OS Woes: Developers tend to write for iPhone and iPad tablet first, even though Android has twice the market share, because Android suffers from fragmentation. Now, let’s look at the problems faced by CAD vendors: Not viable operating systems include Nokia’s Symbian (nearly dead), Intel-supported Meego (a.k.a.

Microsoft Mobile: falling market share and runs on some devices it’s licensed at cost and most details available.

Gstarcad portable