Slashdot Mirror

This is one of the best cases for a production phone/pda that is prior to this filing:

HP OmniGo 700LX

Don't worry. Reasonable voice QoS will remain very expensive on legacy (read "differentially priced") airlines. As soon as IP-to-ground services get low enough latency and jitter for voice performance, you can bet the airlines will figure out that some small percentage of their high-$ passengers value this highly.

One of two things will happen. One possibility is that prioritized transit of packets will end up priced only slightly below the pound-me-in-the-ass rates of airphone. The other is that decent QoS will be priced into first class seats and/or front-of-the-plane frequent flyers.

Steven Wright said something like: "I just had the most expensive meal of my life. It was in a movie theater in an airport." Don't worry, it can get worse.

[Disclosure: I've been online from an airliner with a Palm Modem on my Pilot 1000, a PCMCIA faxmodem from my HP 200LX, and I've probably blocked from memory any Newton dialups. At least back in the dark ages, half the fun was sending out "Dear foo, I am writing to you from an airplane" messages....]

I am a clamshell nut. I must have a clamshell design, and I've been very unhappy with the US PDA market for a long, long time. Is it just me, or do PDA product lines improve at a snail's pace?

Why do I think that? I got an HP100LX about late 1993. For those who don't know, it is a 80186 DOS based palmtop. It came with a great suite of PIM software, and could do some sort of quasi-multitasking with near-dos applications. No backlight, one PCMCIA slot, ran what seemed like forever (30-40 hours+) on two AA batteries. 640x240 resolution.

By about 1998, it disintegrated. I looked for another good PDA, but found nothing. I tried the WinCE based HP 320LX, but it was a piece of garbage. I opted to just buy another 100LX.

Finally, replaced my 2nd 100LX with a Zaurus C860, but not before trying several of PalmOS and WinCE 2.0/2000/2003 handhelds. Yeah, but the C860 is only available in japan. (Technically you can find it in the states.) It runs Linux, though, so slashdot folks should be all over that. WiFi is great, it has CF and SD (SDIO soon). The 640x480 display is stunning brilliant. Oh, and its clamshell/handheld convertable. Running a linux dos emulator on it lets me run all the old apps I ran on the 100LX (including Derive), at a good speed. Battery life is about 7 hours of continuous use with judicious use of WiFi, which is not bad.

I'm not impressed, at all, with this ipaq model. 640x480? I was halfway there a *decade* ago. 640x480 has been out on handheld PCs for at least 3 years now, though maybe not in the US. The processor speed is nice, but I just have to have a clamshell.

I think the C860 is ideal for grad and undergrad college students because of the scientific apps on linux, wifi, clamshell and other reasons I've outlined. I don't want just another toy PDA or PIM system. A PamOS 3.0 device will do basic PIM stuff quite handily. There are some seriously killer linux math apps (similar to mathematica) that run quite well on the C860, too. I just don't think this ipaq is a good geek's PDA because of the native OS and other reasons I've outlined.

I want to see a new PDA here in the US that I can be as excited about as I was the 200LX and and the C860.

More about Zaurus C860

More info on the ancient 100/200lx I lament

"It actually fills a vacuum in the market," of an X86-based handheld, he said.

Some vacuum. Perhaps just a lack of demand?

HP 200LX technical details

The closest thing to what what he's looking for is the DOS version of Derive running on the Hewlett-Packard HP200LX, a 80186 (not a typo) based DOS handheld. (A bit of searching should turn up a demo.)

Derive for DOS is old and the interface is a bit clunky (compared to Maple or Mathematica), but it beat the tar out of a HP48. Heck, on a 200LX, it's probably still the best and most usable symbolic math package in something approaching the size of a scientific calculator. (Though that may be changing with the availablity of source code for systems like Axiom and Maxmima.)

Can you say prior art? The HP 95LX ran MS-DOS in 1991, even though it's not credit card sized, according to this judge it would be infringing right?