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Linux PDAs in the Field
BorrisYeltsin writes "
A story here at InformationWeek about a guy who has equipped his 3500 feild engineers using the new Agenda VR3 palmtop's. It brings up an interesting issue about the Sharp Linux PDA and how the different libraries and API's will cause problems for developers." Having now seen the iPaq running Linux, KDE, and even Konqueror, I now believe its possible.
Nowhere in the article does it say that ths gentleman equiped his people with Agenda VR3s.
In fact, it quite cleary states the he used:
"Symbol Technologies Inc.'s model 2700 PDA and a custom port from Linux provider Red Hat Inc. formed the basis of the platform."
Doesn't anyone read the articles anymore?
Or do you just let people post anything they want?
On the flipside, it's an ironic fact that there's more software available for the iPAQ on Linux than on CE, due to the explosion in Linux over recent years and the hard work and dedication of volunteers, particularly those at handhelds.org in this case. For example, AFAIK, there's no MAME port for CE, but xmame works (with some difficulty) on the Intimate iPAQ distro.
I'm sure that lots of folks are interested in usability for mobile Linux solutions. After stability, I think usability is critical to commercial success in the handheld PDA market. Developers might want to take a clue from Palm's success, and "dumb down" their UI's so they are simpler to use. Microsoft learned that lesson with CE. 3.0 is much simpler than it's predecessors.
For myself, I'll keep buying the latest hardware and loading the (almost) latest Linux for it because I can, and because it's fun. But my Mother won't get anywhere near an iPAQ running Linux except when looking over my shoulder while I run my latest mame rom. 8)
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll
get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
The advantage of a PDA:
--You can instantly call forth a date or number without flipping tons of pages to get at it.
--It has a backlight. Useful for looking up directions at night, and also if you're using the bathroom and the power goes out (happened to me. I admit it).
--PDA's are often smaller than a paper organizer, but are able to provide much more detailed information. You can compress an amount of information that would fill 100 paper organizers into something that fits into your pocket
--The ability to save a copy of your information in a safe location. True, if you back up your Palm and then lose it, you're out $150. But for some people, losing $150 is not half as bad as losing the phone number of a client with a million dollar contract, which could happen if they use paper (which can't be backed up--easily).
But you're right that there are some geeks who are more interested in PDA's as cool technology promoting such and such OS than as tools for doing valuable work. If linux PDA companies cater to the first group and not the second (which is what they've been doing) and ignore usability issues (which they've constantly been doing) linux will never become a mainstream PDA OS. A linux PDA is destined and damned to failure. A PDA that just happens to use linux, that might have a pretty good shot.
The average PDA user, even more so than the average PC user, willc are less what OS is inside as long as they can organize themselves reasonably well, and connect to the office internet conveniently.
I think thats why the Palm OS has been so successful. Its simplicty over features, although with the recent iPaq success that might start to change. The iPaqs are not simple, but feature rich (and cost as much as a reasonably sized pc these days).
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Will a Linux PDA just "work"? Or will they need a tech back at the office to troubleshoot when things go wrong? Most PDA users are not the type to compile software, etc.
Now I know if I were a field researcher and my boss were to equip me with an IPAQ, my productivity would increase tenfold...in Pocket Quake. I think it's important that even researchers in the field have what office workers have had for years: work computers the growth of whose pr0n archives is directly proportional to the increase in their cumulative Solitaire scores.
The X server binary on the Agenda is a little over 1M and has an in-memory size of 540k. There is also about 2.5M of GUI libraries and fonts installed, although, obviously, not all of that gets loaded into memory. That's not tiny, but it's quite acceptable even on a 16M/16M machine like the Agenda VR3. On the next generation Linux handhelds, which will probably have at least 64M of flash and 64M of memory, this is pretty much negligible.
I think the biggest win of Linux-based handhelds is their compatibility with Linux/UNIX desktop APIs. And the biggest threat to them is people crafting oddball APIs because they somehow believe that these little handhelds can't run the desktop APIs. There is no need. Even the Agenda VR3 is a faster and more powerful machine than many UNIX workstations a few years ago, workstations that ran UNIX and X11 just fine.
I particularly think that trying to push systems like Qt/Embedded onto Linux handhelds "for efficiency reasons" are self-serving attempts by a vendor to corner the Linux embedded GUI market: once a handheld is based around such a non-X11 window system, commercial developers have little choice but to buy the commercial libraries. And there is no indication that systems like Qt/Embedded are more efficient in any practically interesting way that an X11 server.
So, my recommendation is: if a "Linux handheld" doesn't run a standard Linux kernel and a standard X11 server, forget about it and don't buy it--there are plenty that do.
(As an aside, the Agenda VR3 is a great machine. You have to make sure that you have a recent version of the software installed; some of the machines ship with a really ancient version of the OS. The standard calendaring applications aren't quite up to Palm3/4 quality, but for developing and deploying custom applications, it's a lot better than the Palm. The biggest limitation is the lack of expandability--support for CF cards would be really great.)
I think it is important that Linux handhelds not do the same thing that we criticize large corporations for doing when a standard is developed. That means it should be an open standard. That means other people (who aren't running Linux) should be able to interface with it easily.
Yes, this does mean you are making it easier for your competitor to steal your work, but that was the whole point of being open. So you don't have to re-invent to wheel, and the person who impliments the standard the best rises to the top.
Word isn't evil because its a Microsoft Word Processor. Its evil because it uses a proprietary file format that is accepted in the business world. Linux hand helds would be just as propreitary if they closed their standards to corporations (like Microsoft) when, and if, they become the defacto standard.
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