10GB In A Linux PDA

Deep Penguin writes: "Perhaps attempting to captitalize on the concept of data mining (mixed with turtles?), Serial Systems of Singapore has announced the Terapin Mine, a hand-held the size of a 35mm camera that looks to be a fusion of a double-fistful of geek toys: network storage (10-12Gb), audio record/playback, digital picture display (composite video out), PCMCIA reader and e-mail sender. It's attached to the world via 10BaseT, USB or whatever I/O card is in the PCMCIA socket (modem, LAN, wireless, etc.) Of course, all complex systems evolve until they can read Usenet news, leaving them an upgrade path to version 2. Price? $599. Delivery? End of August, they say. And it runs Linux, so no Microsoft tax." An anonymous reader points to this CNET article on the device as well. I was afraid this would live as vaporware on the Terapin site forever.

Comments

It's all about Power

[Big Yak]

How much battery life does this thing have? After PDAing around the world for a couple months, batterly life is foremost on my mind.

I have an iPAQ with a PCMCIA card slot, sometimes hooked to a AirCard card (sweet wireless 128k download speeds in a taxi!), and sometimes to a Cisco Aironet wireless LAN card. We recently demoed this working through a Tachyon 1.5 meter dish satelite connection, routed to a wireless base station. I was streaming MP3s to a cow farm in Germany. Amazing applications, but one Achilies heel...

The problem: Power. My battery (even with the extra battery in the PCMCIA sleeve) runs out in less than 2 hours. As soon as I pop in an 1 Gig IBM Microdrive, it drops to about 1 hour, if lucky. To counter this, I've build a little laptop backpack that has 4 rechargable D-cells putting out the 5V DC that the iPAQ wants... backed up by a 12V DC-AC car converter and 3 solar cells mounted on the backside of the backpack (yes, I know it looks geeky, but stick on a couple Rage Against the Machine stickers and people think it's just a fashion statement, the latest in do-it-yourself geek-wear.)

So, the bottom line is now I carry a bag as big as a laptop whose sole purpose is to power my handheld laptop. Of course, I also charge my Digital Camera and Cell Phone off the same bundle, but I still feel like I'm missing something...

Nice piece of Geek hardware, but...

[hillct]

What's it's target function? They don't seriously expect users to implement this as NAS of course... Is it then intended as an MP3 player... a PVR (player) ?, an email client? This device seems to be sufering from schizophrenia.

Whatever happened to the idea to Keep It Simple, Stupid...? Do one or two things and do them well. That's why PalmOS has seen the success it has, while WinCE still flounders trying to decide if it wants to be A PDA platform or a PC platform.

--CTH

I can't find a use for it

[Tooky]

I have to say I'm not overly impressed with this. Perhaps I'm biased because I can't see a major use for this, for me. But from reading the site it just seems like an overly marketed image viewer/m3 player. Ok it has online connectivity, but then its $599. That's a lot of money to transfer files from the office to home. I'd be more tempted to spend the cash on a year's *DSL connection.

Its online features seem a little too little. A mobile device, which lets you email mp3s and image files, wow! Oh and lets not forget the file sharing. For me if there's something I want to share online, I'll put it on server where the connection will be reliable, and the files will be available.

It doesn't seem to have many applications that I could use, and at $599 its too expenisve (for my pocket) to get as a toy. A bigger screen, some kind of useful input device, applications I can use productively and I'll buy it^h^h^h^h^h^hhave a laptop.

Dammit...

[verbatim]

Lemme just clean the drool from my keyboard...

I am very concerned about the storage - 10-12GB HDD... what kind of HDD? I've heard bad things about the Creative Jukebox where the HDD can be sensetive to motion. While the prospect of storing this amount of data on a very portable PDA, I am worried that it is (1) easily lost, (2) easily stolen, (3) easily broken. 10GB is a lot of data...

I like my smartcards and compact flash media. You can store/organize information and worry less about total loss (if you loose or break one, you aren't completly lost).

Before I run out and buy one, I'd want to know:

- reliability
- HDD specs (can I replace it cheap or do I need an expensive part)
- warranty options

I was just looking at a picture of the device and I was thinking - cellphone. It looks like a cellphone but does everything except make phone calls and prepare dinner... now if it could only prepare dinner... mmmm... dinner... ;)

huh?

[/dev/niall]

By what stretch of the imagination is this a PDA? A four line, 20 character display? They make a big deal about being able to transfer pictures from your digital camera to the device. What then? View them on a display that makes my cell phone look good? ;) Cool to be sure, but I'll keep my iPaq thank you very much. This ain't taking the place of a Palm anytime soon either.

well..

[NoSoup4You]

they talk about this being able to hold thousands of digital images...and about some sort of photo album. I'm sorry, but that tiny little display doesn't seem to be adequate for the task.

Risk of disk crashes?

[Ryu2]

As long as these things use magnetic media with moving parts, I would be leery of a disk head crash. As they get more miniturized, I'm just more scared that a disk failure will wipe out a large chunk of data, due to the extremely high information density.

I'll wait until solid state lets us have hard-disk like capacities.