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The Inside Scoop on Yopy
jsse writes "Linux.com has an interview with a Yopy programmer Young Hoon Kim. He told us what we can do with this promising Linux PDA - like running Apache on it." A little light on substance, but several interesting points. As it stands, the iPaq is really the only Linux handheld candidate at this level (with high end features like a color LCD). This one is due out later this year.
YOPY is quite powerful and seems to run fast and smoothly. I've been tinkering with one for a while now, and it's well designed. It could be a little smaller and lighter, but it is comparable to the Compaq IPAQ, so I guess I can't complain. If you want "back-pocket" PDA, get an Agenda... it's really tiny but slow as molasses.
The CPU can handle most X games fine. I had Doom running a while back, with no problems. Quake shouldn't be too far off.
Biggest problem is battery life... power management seems screwy in the current YOPY kernels...
If I had a PDA, I would want something like BeOS on it. Linux is nice and all, but it is heavily command-line driven. Unless you cake X on top of it (which would require a hell of a lot of resources and X hacking), you're just stuck with a command line. I would much prefer a GUI like BeOS which is lighter weight, faster, and better suited for such a purpose. A touchscreen+scribbly writing+keyboard would make a nice BeOS PDA.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
Not at all! Color is important for the trivial normal day-to-day PDA tasks like calendars and todo lists. Why? The screens are so low resolution that it's necessary to have another way to code information, and color is ideal. Take a look at the calendar app on PalmOS. Without color, the month view is completely useless for anything other than "yup, the 28th is a monday". Any days with scheduled items get a little black dot -- which means almost of them, in my case. There's really not room for more meaningful icons -- take a look at the Datebk3 replacement app to see how cluttered, ugly, and nonfunctional that can get. With color, different events can be blue or green or whatever. Same with the todo list -- sure, one can waste a column with a number for priority -- but why not just color code them? More instant impact, and no extra screen space required.
(Obviously, all options need to have a color-free fallback for the colorblind, but that's no reason to waste this ability for everyone else.)
Don't get me wrong... I like linux. I'm running it at work and at home on couple machines.
Why, though, would you want this in a handheld device? A standard unix startup includes device initialization, filesystem integrity checks, etc. and then login. In other words, it's designed to set up everything, then allow the user to work. In a handheld, I want to be able to work NOW. Initialize the IR port when I want to use it. Don't waste my time (and battery life) initializing it before I can work. When I'm done, shut it down as soon as possible.
This just-in-time device management is something that linux doesn't really have. While the device might be good for linux if it make that kind of management possible, I'm not sure that I believe that linux is good for a handheld device right now.
One of the arguments against CE is that Windows just doesn't scale down to a handheld device - a device like a Palm (or the late, lamented Newton, for that matter) that has an OS designed from the ground up specifically for handheld devices has big advantages over a downsized PC.
I'm not sure one way or another here. I own a Palm Vx (and I had a Palm III before that), and I used to have a Newton MessagePad 100, and before that a Sharp Wizard (with the touchscreen). I've used CE, and it's okay, but bloated as hell. All in all, I've been using some type of pocket device since about 1991 or so. The Wizard was great for it's time, but there was no easy PC synchronization at the time, and the pen was just for drawing and selecting on-screen buttons - it couldn't do even rudimentary data entry. On the other hand, it had separate batteries for operation and memory backup, and could go 6+ months of pretty regular use before you had to replace the battery. And it was pretty thin, so it worked well with a coat pocket.
Newton was a revelation when it came out. I saw it and immediately had to have one. The speed was OK, the battery life wasn't too bad (fresh batteries every couple of weeks), but it was bigger than the Sharp it replaced. The OS was smart as hell, despite the mediocre recognition (which got better with time) - it's still the only device where it was intuitive to tell it "schedule lunch with Bob tomorrow" and it could figure out what you meant! They were still too big when Apple Steved the whole Newton line, but if Newton had been allowed to keep on going it very well might have left CE stillborn at the high end and larger form factor.
My Palm is terrific because it's small, quick, and streamlined. Data entry is simple, synchronization is simple, and it works well with my iBook, Windows PC, and Linux PC. It's not as smart as my Newton was (natively), and I can't use real handwriting (Grafitti was originally a Newton software package before the Pilot existed), but it's small enough for the shirt pocket (the Holy Grail), and the battery life is the best since the Wizard. CE is a blivet in comparison.
CE still uses an old-fashioned filesystem metaphor, stores apps separate from executable space, and crams much of an interface designed at least for a 640x480 display into 1/4 the real estate. Despite improvements in the new version, how can that satisfy the needs of the computing/PDA mainstream? I'm afraid that Yopy will be the same. It's nice-looking hardware, but I don't see how Linux works any better than PalmOS or even CE as a PDA operating system. I'd much rather see Linux running on a system in the class of the CE "Jupiter" mininotebooks or even the handhelds rather than the palmtop-class hardware - I think the effort needed to put a usable distro onto a PDA isn't going to be worth it. I hope I'm wrong.
I just don't think Linux's strength lies in the PDA space - the only benefit I see is (theoretically) easier development because a Unix programmer should be able to easily write code for a Linux-based PDA like the Yopy. But writing Palm code is already pretty simple, and a lot of Win32 expertise can be re-used on CE (which, unfortunately, is a strength of CE). Sadly, I see Yopy getting squished in the market and that can't help the Linux cause at all - hopefully a failure won't hurt it, either.
Does anyone think that entering the PDA arena with what's been going on is such a good idea? Palm, the real leader, is in major trouble. Why would you want to enter the market now, especially with something targeted from $400 to $600, when anyone who's going to pay that probably already has a PDA? Crazy... don't be surprised to see this one fail, especially if they're hoping that the strength of linux alone will float it, because it didn't float indrema. Different sectors, granted, but linux alone does not a business plan make.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
In order of importance stuff like that is way lower than other PDA requirements such as:
If the substantially lacking in some of these areas, then you'll be the proud owner of a piece of shit. Whether it's running a Linux kernel or not is irrelevant.
Mame runs on the Psion handheld. Indeed it is in black & white but you can play packman, asteroids, and all the rest. Just the sheer number of Mame ROMs makes Psion the master of the handheld gaming market. There's also a gameboy emulator, but it pales in comparison to EMame.
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If you want to browse the web, you can use Psion's free web brower which supports javascript and frames, or you can download Opera and use that if you need SSL.
If you ever need to make a document, under Psion you can type it up, insert a spreadsheet, graph, clip-art, sounds, and more. Like I've said, Palms are toys.
You can port anything you want. Psion's OS, (EPOC) has a wonderful free development kit & emulator for download. A few open source apps have been ported, such as xPDF.
Lets also not forget that Windows CE has quite a few Open Source Apps ported to it as well. Don't have the numbers to compare, but I'd bet it rivals Palm as far as the number of projects ported.
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Now even if that doesn't turn you off... What's the benefit of COLOR anyways? You can view pictures in B&W and still understand fully what you are looking at.
The only advantage of COLOR is the ability to watch videos... But again, WHY? If you have 32Megs of ram, you'll have about 30 seconds of video, provided you do nothing else, and the video will still be quit choppy and it's a tiny screen anyhow.
In other words... COLOR on a handheld is just another of the bells and whistles. Just like MP3 players, you have such a small ammount of storage and short battery life, it's completely useless.
{RANT}
All the Windows CE and Palm handhelds are just toys. For people that really need a device which fits in your pocket, and still does everything your desktop can (short of watch videos) buy a Psion 5mx. Fully featured Word processor, agenda, database, spreadsheet, terminal, and tons of great freeware for astronomy, chemistry, xpdf, calculators, encryption, electronics and more. Save yourself some wasted money and frustration.
{/RANT}
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"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
However, even something like the AgendaVR (66MHz MIPS) is powerful enough to run Linux 2.4 with XFree86 4.0 quite comfortably. And the benefits of having standard Linux running on it are significant. You may not want to actually use normal desktop linux applications or command line programs while tapping away on your machine. However, having a standard environment makes a lot of libraries and tools port very easily. And because you can log into your little handheld and even run X11 apps in both directions, debugging gets really eas.
For the AgendaVR, it took me maybe an hour to set up the cross-compilation environment, get PPP up and running, and read the documentation. After that, porting applications and tools to the AgendaVR was a snap: it took maybe 10 minutes to get a web browser and a scripting engine cross-compiled for the AgendaVR.
In that regard, I'm wondering whether the Yopy is doing the right thing by going with a different window system. If the AgendaVR can run XFree86 4.0 without problems, it should fly on the Yopy with its faster processor and bigger memory. I think the Yopy would be better off going with XFree86 4.0 as well. (And calling its window system the "W Window System" is nothing short of confusing, since X11's predecessor was called "W".)